Slow Baja - Chuck Skewes Sailing The Baja Ha-Ha!

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Chuck Skewes grew up on Vashon Island, spending his childhood surrounded by boats and learning to sail in El Toros—the tee-ball equivalent for sailors. He developed a passion for racing and was a highly sought-after crew member for the local captains. During his summers, he worked on fishing boats in Alaska, a lucrative yet exhausting and dangerous job for a teenager.As he spent his days fishing, Skewes dreamed of becoming a professional sailor. This ambition led him to find work as a sailmaker and move to San Diego, where he could fully pursue his craft and passion.In his long career as a professional sailor, Skewes has won multiple national and regional championship titles across a variety of sailing classes. Notably, in 2009, he earned the title of Grand Master World Champion in the Etchells class sailing Miss Murphy.For today’s Slow Baja Podcast, we met at his Ullman Sails loft in Mission Valley to discuss his role as the “Newbah” (Grand Poobah) at the Baja Ha-Ha—the Slow Baja of sailing events.#bajahaha #lattitude38 #sailinglife #sailing #bajamexico #sailinginmexicoSubscribe to the Baja Ha-Ha on YouTube here:https://www.youtube.com/@BajaHa-Ha/shortsNeed Baja Bound Insurance? Get a quote here: https://www.bajabound.com/quote/?r=fl...Support Slow Baja with a donation here: https://www.slowbaja.com/supportJoin a Slow Baja Adventure here: https://www.slowbaja.com/adventures

Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning in to the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches and hands down my favorite tequila. Well, if you've been listening to me for a while, you know I'm an absolute minimalist when it comes to Baja travel. But the one thing I never leave home without is a good old paper map. and my favorite is the beautiful, and I mean beautiful, Baja Road and Recreation Atlas by benchmark maps.

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The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. That's right, you need a sweater. And the Purleys is the perfect mid-layer. I've been wearing it at Chrissy Field when I'm walking Frank. And you'll get to see it in the new promo recording on today's podcast from my friends, Duke and Margo Lambert at Perleys. More about them later in the show. Okay, well, today's show, today's show is with Chuck skews. He is the new ba, pooh-bah of the Baja ha-ha-ha. That's right. The Baja-ha-ha-ha-ha is the slow Baja of sailing, and it's a cool event. I've been thinking about doing that event for about 30 years. I think it's been going for about 32 years, and I need to get on a sailboat and do that event. Well, Chuck tells you all about it. And without further ado, it's, Chuck skews the new ba-poo-bah of the Baja ha-ha-ha today on slow Baja.

Chuck skews so glad that you can make some time to talk to me about sailing in Baja. I have had the Baja ha-ha-ha-ha-on-my radar since I was a college kid at San Diego State. You are the grand Poo-Bah ambassador in Chia. You know himself the new ba now because Richard was the grand pooh-bah and I'm the new one. The new ba. The new ba. Well, pick it up. Tell me about the bah-ha-ha-ha.

We're going to jump right into it before I get distracted with what else could go wrong. We've had some technical difficulties today. The bah-ha-haha is a cruising rally mostly for sailboats, but there are power boats that do that. And it isn't really a race. It's more of just a guided tour of boats that, want to sail in the tropics and head down the coast, and it's safety and numbers and kind of a hand-holding thing with a lot of events that kind of build lifelong friendships. And I think it's much more now than what it was originally going to be.

And it's become kind of a staple. This is the 32nd one in 33 years. We missed COVID, yeah. Amazing. And it's a good party. The parties, if you want to party all the way, you could party all the way. If you just want to party a little, you could party a little. But the format has allowed for just kind of go at your own pace kind of setup.

There's the locals at these, we stop in pretty remote places, and the locals in those areas put on little parties for us, and it's quite magical. So it is the introduction to, if you've got a sailboat, and you're doing some coastal stuff, day trips here and there, this is where you get your feet wet to say, okay, we're going down the coast. We're going out to the great unknown, the edge of the map where you see the big monsters out there. But we're doing it in a group with people who are good people who know what they're doing.

And they're going to show us how to do it, how to do it safely. And if something goes wrong, there's help. Exactly. It's a slow Baja trip for sailboats. Well, sailing slow in general. It's just over a walking pace. And so we go 750 miles, but we take 12 days to do it. We stop in Bahia Tortuga, or Turtle Bay, more commonly known to the gringoes.

And then a place called Bahia Santa Maria, which is the north part of Bahia Magdalena, Mag Bay. And they're easy to get in and easy to get out of well-protected bays. and they're spaced just the right distance apart. And we have people from all walks of life that do this. We have engineers, we have doctors, we have electricians. And so if you have something going wrong with your boat, and if you've ever boated, you always have something going wrong with your boat, there's always someone that might have the same situation before

and if figured out a solution or someone that knows how to fix it. And that's one of the big values in going down to this group. That's the safety in numbers that you were talking about. You're not worried about piracy. Not at all. So years ago, everybody's talking about, what if we get boarded? And I've sailed down the coast. I was talking to you earlier.

I don't remember how many. I've done 10 bah-ha-ha-ha-has. And I probably did, we used to do two Cabo races a year and then a Porto-A-Arta race. And out of all those times going to Mexico over the last 20-some years, never got boarded and never knew anybody that got boarded, except for coming back, someone got boarded by the Mexican Navy, similar to a U.S. Coast Guard stop.

It was probably less invasive than a U.S. Coast Guard stop, and that's about the extent of it. Well, people always ask me about, aren't you afraid, aren't the cartels going to get you? And I always say, in Baja, the potholes on the road, that's what's going to get you, or driving at night because you didn't plan well, and now you need to get to where you're going,

to meet your, you know, Airbnb or whatever, and there's the black cow on the darkest part of the road. And that's what's going to get you. I've never felt ever concerned about, you know, cartels or crime or whatever. I realize it is happening, but it has not happened and I have not had any interaction with it. No, and we've never had anything like that in any of the events. Matter of fact, I think more boats have items go missing in San Diego before they leave in a than we've had actually on the ha-ha. So let's pick it up here. You have a history of sailing, and you said to me earlier, you are a professional sailor.

Yes. So break that down for me. So it's not a real common occupation. So I have a sail loft, which is my main source of income, but my second source of income is sailboat racing, which, you know, high net worth individuals might want to do really well on an event and they'll hire people that are a lot stronger in the different aspects of sailing than they are to get them to that point. And, you know, the extreme end of professional sailing is like the America's Cup or the around the world race where it's 100% professionals.

They can actually make a living doing it. But that's out of all the people that sail and the people that can make a living doing it, it's under a tenth of a percent. So what's your relationship with Dennis Connor? I have a good relationship with Dennis Connor. Sorry, that's an inside sailing San Diego joke. Sorry, folks. He's clearly the most famous sailor in the world. Juxa professional. And he's a fantastic sailor.

And we just raced against him a month or so ago. We beat him. But he's starting to get to the end of his career. He's having a few health issues. But he's still one of the most skilled sailors that you'll ever meet. And he loves sailing probably more than. 99% of the people. Not only is he great at it,

he actually really loves sailing. After all these years. After all these years. As a college kid in the 80s here at San Diego State, I had an assignment to go photograph Dennis, and he was a little prickly because a college kid had to come photograph him, but he was a professional,

and he made sure that he had the sponsor, I think Pepsi was a sponsor, and he had the Pepsi right prominently displayed and the Rolex prominently displayed. and he had it all down and he made it seven minutes for me, and then I was done and I had to go. Bye, I've got work to do. I mean, he's a very focused individual, I think is the best way to put it. And he has a goal in mind.

And if you're going to help in that goal, he'll give you all the time in the world. If you're not going to help in that goal, you're going to get very little time. Well, that was me, and I didn't mean to put you on the spot. But it also answered the question for me as I was calculating, like, is Dennis still alive? He's still alive and he's still sailing? Yeah, he's still sailing. Okay. So back to you, Chuck, that's why we're here.

You grew up on an island in Washington, correct? Yeah, I grew up on Vashon Island in Puget Sound which was between Seattle and Tacoma. And so naturally growing up on an island, you have a relationship with the water. Yeah, so my, the history of my sailing started in the first grade. The first day of first grade, I met a guy on the monkey bars. This kid, he became my friend. Our parents met, and his parents were members of the yacht club, and they were sailing these little boats called El Toro, those little eight-foot boats.

And they said to my parents, say, hey, you should get your children involved in this. And so my parents bought a boat. We finished it off and joined the yacht club and started sailing. And I'm the only person of my family that kept sailing. About the time I was a senior in high school, my family kind of quit sailing.

And I continued on. And then I commercial fished for nine years of my life in Alaska. That was a lucrative thing for a long time. And I started at age 15. So I was pretty young when I first year to last. But difficult, yeah? Yes. Oh, difficult.

And it was kind of life-saving for me because I probably would have been more of a troubled team, but I had to work 20 hours a day and work under kind of a strict environment. I made good money. And I decided one year that I was either going to work on a charter boat or be a sailmaker because at that time, there were no professional sailors. And the best sailors were sailmakers. So I came back. There was a sailmaking job, and that's what I've been doing ever since.

So you are a youngster, honestly, as you really were into this. Yes. And so you must have worked your way around the marina, around the club. People who owned boats saw your earnestness, saw your seriousness, and you had opportunities to sail. And I'm assuming you worked your tail off to make those boat owners happy and probably won some races as a youngster. Yeah, I always tell everybody,

I'm more competitive, or at least was more competitive in my mind than my skill set. So I could make up for lack of skill just by determining that I was going to continue and try to win. And I quit sailing with my parents at a pretty young age. I started sailing with other people at the yacht club and going on bigger races. And then I was doing quite well. I'd had some great successes. and then I decided, you know, to move to San Diego because I was racing down in San Diego about once a month. And I was racing to get the flight home on Sunday night to a frozen car and rain and dark.

And I realized, you know, I could do it the other way. Anytime I wanted to be in the frozen, rainy, dark night, I could just fly up to Washington. And so I had moved to San Diego. And then I really worked hard on my sailing career at that point. Can you explain what it's like to race? a sailboat. It's a little bit like chess during an earthquake, I guess, would be. There's very strategic moves that you do, kind of pat moves you do when another person

does a certain move. But it's all about keeping the boat going as fast as possible at all times. While you do that, being clean in the corners, there's probably no such thing as a perfect race. Like you could probably never go around the race course and it'd be perfect. So it's whoever screws up the least. And the wind continually shifts and being able to take advantage of that and being on the correct side of those shifts, it gives you leverage. And then knowing the rules very clearly so you know how to take advantage of other boats.

And, I mean, it's constantly evolving. A lot of instrumentation in it now. That's a new thing in the last 15 years, really. And so there's a couple different types of racing. There's buoy racing, which you go out. for the day and you race three or four races and then there's offshore racing and um i've done 13 trans pacific races so from mainland u.s to hawaii and then we do races to Mexico we actually canceled this year because of some of the issues that they had down there we happened to be right

around the time of the start of that race and and uh so the yacht club thought it was better not to send not to go to port of arta during that fortifier to excitement yeah exactly no it was only one day It was one day, but it was the wrong day for us. It just happened right when we were getting ready to go. I lost a trip that day, too. So tell me a little bit about the buoy racing. Is that what's traditionally called beer can racing? Beer can racing is a little bit different.

It is buoy racing. So beer can racing is a weeknight racing. Generally, not necessarily even all race boats. Some cruising boats race just because they're fun. And we call those random leg. Like they might not be just straight up. and straight downwind, they're going to go around geography on the land or geographical shifts in different buoys in different areas.

They still try to make them windward lures, but they're not truly buoy racing. I mean, in a sense, they are buoy racing because they're short, they're one day, you know, a couple hours, and then you're done. And that's almost every city on the water in the United States has beer can racing. And you said you also did open water trans ocean, yeah, ocean racing. Yeah. Long distance, we call them long distance races. And so, you know, a medium distance race would be, you know, 400 or maybe even just as low as 100 miles to 800 miles.

You know, like Cabo race is about 800 miles. That's not a super long race for us because it's, you know, it's right around four-day window for us. Races to a wire quite long, you know, depending on the boat. on a fast boat, it's eight days, on a slow boat, it could be 20. And break the whole process down of who's sleeping, who's racing, who's, I'm assuming you're getting very little sleep. Very, yeah. There's a few of us on the boat that get less sleep than the others because we're more

valuable in the decision-making process. And then there's some people that just work certain parts of the boat and they'll get, they'll get more sleep. Nobody gets a lot of sleep. It's not like somebody's getting the night in a hotel. and the rest of us are working. That's not the case. But when you have to be woken up for every decision and every maneuver, you tend to just not get much sleep because you go four on, four off pretty much. And a couple people rotate at a time so you're not generally don't switch the whole

crew at once. And in four hours to get from, you know, fully kidded up and adrenaline rushing back to go to sleep and get any meaningful sleep and then back up again. Yeah, that's a little tough. The race is actually over by the time you're tired enough to be able to drop off to sleep immediately. Yes. What's funny is you think you've gotten in a rhythm or you could go forever. And then when you finish, you realize then how tired you are because you go lay down at a hotel and you sleep for 12 hours, wake up and could go right back to sleep. Exactly. Exactly.

So you've told me a little bit about what's happening or the types of sailboat racing, but you really didn't. get into what's happening on the boat. You said you're playing chess in a earthquake. Yeah, so there's a, there's a picture on the wall behind us. Yeah, right behind us this picture. There's a wave crashing over the, yeah, that's a, that's a, quite a poster picture. That actually made several magazine covers.

We were passing Cabo on a record setting pace to Porto Iyarta, and we had to change the spinnaker, and that's right as the sun came up. So that's why the lighting is so great on that picture. We're doing about 27 knots. We'd hit 30 knots, so 31.3, a boat speed just before that. And for a monohal, that's just insane speed, especially a, you know, a 30-year-old boat or 25-year-old boat at the time.

It was modified, and for that, we had a new keel on and, you know, different. It's an old boat going flat out. Flat out, yes. Yeah. And it was exciting. I wouldn't say it was 100% fun. there was a lot of pretty intense times. You know, it's like it sounds like a rocket that keel screams like a banshee,

and it sounds like a rocket on the side of the hole with the water going by, and it shakes violently, and you're trying to sleep, eat, and sail in that environment. But it's what I, I love doing it for years. I've kind of lost my real urge to want to do it now, because I've done it so much of it, but it's pretty exciting. And so what I mean by a chest and an earthquake is like you have these pat, moves that you do, like when someone attacks on you, you might do this particular maneuver

or approach in a mark. You do these, you have these set maneuvers or a quiver of set maneuvers. There's a playbook, basically. And the more you sail, the more you learn these little tricks. But with the wind shifting and the velocity going up and down, anybody can sneak up on you. Even someone with much less skill, they can come from behind or grab a, hit a big shift, or you run into kelp or something. So there's a lot, there's just a ton of variables, or you have sale damage, or you maybe even have the wrong sale up because you have sales for different conditions.

So obviously, the more you sail, the more you get in tune to what the needs are, and then how to direct the crew so that they understand that need, too. And I'm assuming at this level, you've got a skilled crew. You're not also training people as that you might be on a beer can race on a Wednesday night. somebody wins their kids' school auction and gets to go out on the boat, like me. We like to introduce new people to the boat, so we wouldn't take a whole crew of new people, and we have a pretty set crew, but the race schedule is pretty full, and not everybody can make everything. So I have a few key people that I do, like my big races, like I call it my A crew,

we'll do the key races. And so, like, I have one race every summer that we do out of Newport Beach to Catalina, has three days of racing. And I try to put together the best of the best for that. And I have guys I've sailed with for years. I mean, it's funny. It's the same guys I sailed with 20-some years ago. We're all just 20 years older.

Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skills. Exactly. Is that what the saying is? All right. Well, let's get on to a quick break. You know what? I just thought we should take a quick break to hear from Baja bound insurance before we get on to breaking down the Baja-ha-ha-ha.

So we'll be right back. with Chuck skews in just a minute. Here it's Little Baja, we can't wait to drive our old land cruiser south of the border. When we go, we'll be going with Baja Bound Insurance. Their website's fast and easy to use. Check them out at Bajabound.com. That's Bajabound.com, serving Mexico traveler since 1994. Let me tell you about my new favorite sweater.

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It is so amazingly gratifying to, uh, be able to give these kids this chance to keep playing this sport, keep them on the field, keep them out of trouble. Please check it out. Baseball in Baja link at barbers for Baja.org. Thank you. I want to tell you about these new Rocky Talkie radios that I absolutely love. Heavy duty, beautifully made, easy to program, easy to use.

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We're talking about his career as a lifelong sailor. Two things we didn't break down earlier. It'll be in the show notes. Monkey bars, kids, I'll tell you what monkey bars are. Those are things that used to be on every playground. And El Toros, that's a class of sailboats, a very small, it's a starter class. It's like T-ball for sailing. Exactly.

It's a lot like that. Pee-wee football. It's El Toros are what you get your start in if you live near the water. Exactly. All right. Well, Chuck, the Bahaha-ha-ha. The Bah-ha-ha-ha. How did that amazing event come to be?

So Richard Spindler, who started Latitude 38 magazine. Yep. Famed, salient industry magazine. Yes. He was kind of the figure. figurehead of all the racing, when racing was like a real party group, and when it was really big, he started the magazine at a perfect time. It got very large. He's doing very well, working very hard, knew everybody. One of the yacht clubs that held the race to Cabo decided that they

wanted to do something for the cruisers, and they kind of started organizing it, and they weren't having a lot of success. And they asked Richard, hey, Richard, do you want to help us organize this event and they were asking like an absorbent entry fee and he didn't think that what they were doing was necessarily right. So then he just started the Baja, ha, ha, ha. I don't know exactly how he came up with the name. I don't know if I ever asked him, but it fits. And the first year, I believe he had 40 boats signed up. And it was a two-stops, the Turtle Bay and the Bahia, Santa Maria, and then end in Cabo. And it grew from there to some of the years they've had over 200 boats. Wow, I always ballparked it as like 100 boats, but 200, that's an event.

It's quite an event. And, you know, Baja, but Turtle Bay is a very small village. Sure. We see little growths every year. And is there anything at Bihia Santa Maria? There is nothing at Bihia, San Maria. There's a couple cinderblocked buildings that fishermen live in. You wouldn't call them homes because there's no windows or anything.

No, there's no electricity. There's not an accident. So there's not an X. There's not a road. Okay. That's the way I had it, ballpark in my head. And ironically, we have the best party there where a band comes from La Paz, where they have to traverse across some water on barges with their car. Then they have to drive on low-tied beaches to get there.

They bring a generator and they play rock and roll music and we have dancing. And the fishermen sell beer and fish tacos. It's good time. And we're on this bluff overlooking this amazing bay. there's like 27 miles of sand beaches and nothing else. Like there's no civilization near there. Wow. That's still part of Baja.

You can still find those places that don't have people. That's the lured of Baja. It's just, it's amazingly remote and beautiful. Yeah, we say it's desolation on our doorstep. So if I have it correct in my mind, there's not a fixed start date. the date is flexible with atmosphere conditions, water conditions? We always start the first Monday of November.

We have started the last Monday of October, like if the Halloween came on a Monday, that might be the start date because hurricane season ends November 1st, and people can be insured with their boats to enter beyond latitude 22. Most insurance companies use the latitude of 22 as the basis. of where hurricanes will die out. And so as long as we're not south of there by the first of November, that's why it starts when it did.

It had another reason for starting that date, because when he owned Latitude 38, he had a deadline. And he wanted the event to be done in time to write about it for the deadline. Sure. All right. So you get the green light from your insurer. You can go south and everybody meets where. Where's the start?

We start here in San Diego. So we have a little bit of provisions for people that are from out of town, like a special anchorage area. If you're a member of the Baja, you can anchor there, because Morge is very tight here in San Diego. And about 25% of our boats come from, you know, Canada, the Pacific Northwest, Bay Area. And then another 20, 30% come from the Los Angeles area. Then the rest are from this area. So people may have sailed for a few days to get here. Yes.

And then they have to. they have to moor someplace when they're here. Exactly. And what I've found is about 15% of them ish. Their first overnight sale is going to be the first night on the Baja. Wow. They've just day hopped down. And then they get confidence because a bunch of boats are going the same direction and they're communicating on the radio and then we have events that you get to.

And so it's amazing the confidence building as we have. head down the coast. And what's the minimum number? Is it two to be, does anybody just solo this thing? No, we don't allow solo just for safety reasons. And because it, we always want someone to tell the story, you know, if something happened, there needs to be somebody. And so we've had some people that have had two people and then one person bailed off. And we've allowed them to be tracked with us and still communicate with us, but they're officially withdrawn from the ha-ha-ha-whathered one-person boat. There's a few, two. person boats, but most like to do at least three or four. You just get a lot more sleep.

Since this is not really a race, it's an event. It's an event. And you need to, it, you don't need to stress yourself out or unnecessarily. Exactly. It's not a race, guys. It's not a race. It's not a race. We go slow, we say hello. Exactly. It's slow baha on the water. So you take off from, is it start at a club? Is it hosted by a club? It's not hosted by a club. We're completely hosted by ourselves. We have a send-off party at the West Marine in Point Loma, the night before where we do the last cheeseburger in paradise. We have burgers for everybody, and we have a costume competition.

Earlier that day, we have a skipper's meeting, kind of give everybody a debrief if they, in case they don't understand everything and make sure that they're all, their paperwork is in, and everybody's organized and ready to go. They know their communications are all set up with us. And then the following morning, we have a boat parade where we start right off Shelter Island, right off the, I think that's called the Friendship Bell out of the Bowie 17 end of Shelter Island. And all the boats go along, the fireboats blow off there, all their water, and there's news people covering. And then we head out into the ocean, and we have an official start out off of about two miles from Point Loma. Point Loma is one end of the start line, and then we'll be the other end. And we start and everybody just sails down past the Coronado Islands.

And then a couple of days they're in Turtle Bay. And is there some mind shift when you get past Ensenada and you look, I'm assuming you can be in view of the land and just see that there's nothing? You basically, you see, you see land to maybe 20 miles past Ensonata. And then the land kind of goes away pretty quick. So you end up outside of view of land pretty quick. And we actually get that question at the skippers meeting. People say, are we going to be outside of land?

And you can make that choice on your own, but land is not friendly for boaters in general. You know, your boat will generally float just fine if it's just water around you. Land is the only thing that's ever hurt anybody in the ha-ha. Well, we had one sunk by a whale one time. But, yeah. So you get out there and navigation is. so easy now with chart plotters and almost everybody has Starlink, so the communications are very good. Tell me a little bit about what it was like before all that. It's definitely changed it because

years ago, we used to use single side van, which is basically a ham radio built for traveling or water and stuff. And if you got a long way away, you'd use a relay and there was a bunch of ham radio operators that kind of relayed your signals for you. And it would go over the curve of the earth. Like you could at least broadcast a thousand miles, I believe, fairly effectively. And hang on for a second. You just said, it would,

it will go over the curve of the earth. Yes. Now with satellite communications and being able to have to Starlink on your car while you're camping in Baham, be surfing the internet, people don't understand how difficult it was to stay in some level of radio communication.

Exactly. We had a network of volunteer ham radio, retired guys who sat in their attic all night. Yeah, and teenagers with zits on their face. Yeah, it was a whole different group of people that did ham radio. We talked about the Jeremiah O'Brien for just a second when I sailed in Normandy, but we were using ham guys there. The old radio operator, who was a World War II radio operator, was using the old communication, which was getting picked up and relayed here to there, to there, to there.

Exactly. Yeah. And so we used ham radio or the old communication. the we call it single sideband. We had a channel we used and we'd have communication every day. Then people monitored it at different hours and then we'd talk about maybe the fish they got, the weather they have and all that type of things. And slowly the single sideband started going away.

First of all, it's a very power-hungry instrument. And it takes a bit of maintenance because the grounding plates and the bilge and everything you have to have to run it. and the antennas for it. And all other forms of navigation and communication were increasing. We started getting in-reach communication where you could text from your phone through your in-reach and give your position via email. And we even had modems that worked with single sideband.

So we weren't speaking on single sideband for a while, but we were sending text data over the single sideband to a mail server that was distributing. what we had. Before we completely got rid of it, we weren't speaking on it anymore. We were just using it for data. And then we got satellite phones. And satellite phones was kind of actually more of a disconnect

than the single sideband was, because we got rid of single sideband. We had satellite phones and satellite dishes for transfer. But the data was so expensive. Nobody was just chatting on it. So you were just blind. Like when you were sailing to a wire down the coast, There was no communication until you got to a metropolis. Like Cabo was really the only place you had cell coverage going all the way down from Encinada and then Cabo.

So you were a week without any cell coverage or any data short of just grabbing weather data. So you were really disconnected and it was kind of, it was actually kind of refreshing. I used to take like a day or two before I even looked at my emails or texts or phone messages just because it was kind of stressful to think about it. it. And then you would go through it. Now with Starlink, if you have it on all the time, your phone will ring. And I think that it's taken, it's added some things. You know, it's added communications, allowed people to do it more. But it's also taken away some of that lore of, you know, just like everything with Baja, being disconnected, kind of surviving outload. The adventure is now a lowercase A versus an uppercase A or all caps in the past.

Exactly. It's all caps. So when you have this group going down the coast, what happens when somebody has a problem or peels off or gets separated from the group? So is there a monitoring system that worries about that or is this part of you just need to figure this out? No, we have a daily check in where you give your position report. And if you can't reach us, you use a relay. VHF radio only goes line of sight, but since we have so many boats, there's always one person that's probably in range of your VHF and you call. They relay it to somebody else or email it to us as the headquarters and it'll have your position report.

Now, if you're in trouble, boats turn around. Like, we had kind of an incident. We've had very few incidences, but we had an incident last year where a guy lost his crew. They just didn't get along and she hopped off in Turtle Bay, and he was going to go to Bahia, Santa Maria, and try to find someone to join him out from one of the other boats. But he was going by himself, and he had a personal AIS on his life jacket, which is a great thing to have. It puts out a VHF signal that someone's overboard, and you can rescue him, and it goes to every boat that's within VHF range. Well, it fell off his life jacket and turned on, and he didn't realize. So boats turned around, went back to him because they knew he was by himself.

And then finally, one of his friends just called him on the cell phone. And he says, no, I'm all good. So he turned it off and it was all good. And we've had people that have had lines in the prop and need help or, you know, where they, one person who actually got their sail on the prop, their halliard broke. And so then they tried the motor and they sucked their sail into the prop so they couldn't sail and or motor. And so people help each other.

And that's that safety in numbers. thing. Gotcha. Gotcha. And what, you mentioned earlier people would be on the radio and talk about the fish they had caught. So you were sailing slow enough that you can actually be trolling. Oh, yeah.

The fishing is, this is not 27 knots going from the coast. Cruising boats would never go that kind of speed. I mean, to do what we do in this picture here, we're stripped out. We're eating dehydrated food and only making enough water a day to hydrate the food and fill our water bottles. And when you're cruising, your water tank is full and you're showering. You have a lot of food on board and every creature comfort and you have books and, you know, thousands of pounds of gear. And so your boat kind of hits a hull speed, which for most of these boats are around seven, eight knots. And so they're only going that fast. And the fishing,

the first morning after we leave, you know, you go through the night and the first morning just south of Encinada, I don't think I've ever been skunked. We get, you start getting a yellowfin there and then from Baha'ia, or from Turtle Bay to Baha'iah, Santa Maria, we get Dorado. And we usually have to quit fishing because we have more fish than we can personally eat. You've got to quit fishing and start sailing again. Yeah, yes, it's, it's, you put two lines out, you get two on, you know. Amazing. It's really, it's really good.

It's a couple years ago, we was starting to straighten the hooks on the boat I was on because the fish were so huge two years ago, guys were, I think, the average is about 35 pounds for these fish. And so some guys are getting 60, 70 pound fish, and we have some great photos of that. Amazing. Sounds like a pretty good time. Yeah, it's a very good time. Is that how you would characterize the entire Baha ha ha mystique?

It's a pretty good time. Yeah. If you have a boat, it's a pretty good in Southern California. It's a great time. And for a lot of people, it's the best time they've ever had in their life. Like, since I've sailed my whole life, I know a lot of the people in the sailing world, and most of them come from racing.

And a couple of my friends, for instance, from the Pacific Northwest, three of my friends that I grew up sailing with have now retired and they did the ha-ha. And they came up to me and they said, this is the most fun I've ever had in my life. And these guys sailed their entire life. But it's just a different type of sail. It's more relaxing. It's, you know, there's no stress about it. And you just go at your own pace. And after the race ends, after the event ends, it's not.

not a race. After the event ends, what percentage of the people will hang around and explore this Gulf of California now would be the appropriate? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I understand that that's not the best sailing, but it's pretty fun boring. It's pretty amazing place. I mean, but as a sailor, it's not regarded as great sailing. Not great sailing. They do, but it's great mooring. You get, yeah, great mooring. It's great exploring. Yeah. There's a... Just the island off of La Paz, for instance,

the El Spirto Santo is a place you could spend a month at. It's an island that has about 15 or 20 magically blue water sandy beach bays. And each one's got, is slightly different with cliffs or low hills, and there's dolphins and turtles swimming around and sea lions. and the water is super warm and crystal clear. And it's amazing. When you fly over it coming into La Paz, you'll just like, that is obvious a place you have to go.

And so being so close to a place, you know, a place that you can fly in and out of, it's unbelievable. But I would say a percentage-wise of people that do the ha-ha, at least half, if not more, stay down for a year or more. And about 15, or 20% go on to the South Pacific, the Marquesas, French Polynesia or Panama, and go through the canal.

It's really where a big strength in the ha-ha is it gives you a day, you have to untie your dock lines and head out. You know, because to be part of the event, you've got to leave on this date, and you could sit and work on your boat. I've had friends and customers that have spent years getting ready, and then they age out because they never felt they were all the way ready. And this just says, okay, you got to go. You got to do it. Yeah. You got to do it. So give me a couple more minutes and we'll get out of here.

In the Sea of Cortez, in the Gulf of California, you've talked about Spirito Santo. It's such a beautiful island off of La Paz. And that's only a half a day up from Cabo. Yeah, about a day up from Calab. Yeah. So you've turned the corner, you've gone north. Exactly. You personally, how much time have you spent sailing around in the Gulf?

I haven't spent that much. I mean, that's one of my goals to spend more time. And that's really for people who are just farting around. You're a serious sailor who does this for a living in his profession. We don't race in that area. You're not just farting around with that stuff. We don't race in that area anymore. Of course not, yeah.

Anyway, we did that one point that Richard had put on a race out there. And it's a bit of a remote spot without much infrastructure for racing. So it's hard to do. But I've been, you know, the Spirit of Santo and then I've been to L.A. Bay and the islands, I don't remember the names of them off of L.A. Bay, you know, in dayboats, you know, going from the beach over to the islands and stuff. But I haven't spent a ridiculous amount of time cruising there. And I, I've, they're going to open up the Trace Marias, which is the old prison islands off of Port of Bajara. They're going to open those up as a more. Marine Reserve and Park. And I want to be one of the first ones there. Okay. Yeah, that place.

I've seen photos. I have a friend that's kind of working on that project, and he flew over it and videoed. It's beautiful. And that's down on the mainland. It's about 50 miles off the mainland between the Cabo or between the Baja Peninsula and the mainland. Gotcha. All right. Well, Chuck, bring it home for me.

The Baja ha ha, if somebody wants to find out more about. about it, where is the best place? Is there a, is a boat always looking for another crew person? If you're an adventurous person who can get along with others, is there a way that you can get on a list and be picked up? Yes, we have a list on our website on the Baja-haha-haha.com website. We have a crew list, and so anybody can sign up on that crew list, and then we have what we call a crew party in Sausalito,

in September where if you show up at this event, you'll get like a yellow tag says, I'm looking to crew, and a red tag will say, I'm a skipper looking for a crew, and you can meet people and see how you mix. So we try to always help people, because a lot of people will go cruising, and once they do the ha-ha, they only do day trips, you know, like maybe an overnight, so they're going to go back to just being a couple on a boat. So they want more crew for the ha-ha. And so we try to facilitate that. Terrific. Baja.

One more time on the... Baja.5. ha ha ha. ha.com. Baja hyphen haha. com. It'll be in the show notes with a reminder

on what monkey bars are and the El Toro. A single side man. Chuck, are you out there on the internet? If somebody wants to find you, what's the best way

for somebody to reach out if they need to or want to? They can find me through the Baja Haha Cruiser's Rally on Facebook. It's Chuck at Baja-ha-ha-ha-com is my email. And there's in on the, anything, any communication that goes through the website will come to me. We'll come to you. Yes, yeah. All right, well, thanks for making some time for slow Baja today.

I'm really delighted that you were able to decode the Baja ha for me, something I've been thinking about for 30 years. How long has it been going on? This is the 32nd one, so 33 years. Yeah, I've been thinking about it for a long time. That's great. My old college roommate said way back when, when they started that, we needed to do it. We haven't done it yet, but maybe now we're all getting to be middle-aged guys. I mean, the lure of Baja, I don't know how long it'll stay the way it is.

I've just thought of it my whole life. You know, I remember watching the Baja 1,000 on TV when I was a kid on Wild World of Sports or something of that nature. and then it was a big reason I moved to Southern California. Well, we're going to leave it right there. Thanks, Chuck. All right. Thank you. We did it.

Hey, I hope you like that show. Chuck is cool. Made some time for me. He was prepping for a race. Always out and about that guy getting after it on the water. And I was really delighted that he was able to squeeze me in and make some space for me to talk to him at his sail loft. If you like what I'm doing, folks, if you like me getting out,

and about recording these things in person with the guests. I think the connection is much better than sitting there doing a Zoom call with somebody. I think the connection is real. And it was really cool to meet Chuck. Again, that's an event I have wanted to do for 30 years now. Got some great merch in the stores. That's right. The stickers are back.

My replant thousands of stickers. They are better than ever. So if you're old, slow Baja, three and a half inch round, yellow. sticker isn't looking as lemony as it used to hit me up let's get a replan going let's let's get some stickers out to you you know in that uh keep baha slow sticker that is so cool and it it just says everything that you need to know about baha uh you can even put one on your raptor if you uh if you're down with the going slow occasionally i've got some trips on the calendar things that uh in 2027 are selling out quick. So if you're thinking about going on a slow Baja, you know, the winter

2027 is already sold out. The October Slow Baja vintage is half sold out. That's right, October. It's over a year away and it's half sold out. I've got a trip that I haven't even really told you about. It's summer camp, slow Baja style. You're going to have two nights at Rancho La Bayota, two nights at La Concepcion, one night camping on the beach. It's summertime, it's Baja, but all the locations are going to be really lovely. not too hot. Trust me, it's going to be fun. And this is the one that has a lot more time out of the car. So we're going to do summer camp stuff, horseback riding, hikes, plinking with some 22s. Maybe we're going to break some clays with a shotgun. Who knows? It's going to be a lot of fun.

Cooking with a chef, wine-paring dinner at Rancho Labioda. Hit me up if you've been having fun with your buddies and you want to bring your wife or your girlfriend or whatever down, this is the trip. Summer Camp Slow Baja style in June 2027. All right, well, I'm going to tell you about Mary McGee and her pal Steve McQueen. Steve, he loves summer camp and he loved Baja. And Steve said, you know, Mary, Baja is life. Anything that happens before or after? It's just waiting.

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