The Drift
Where we want to go next
December 18, 2025
We keep three passages on the list, and we are trying to be precise about them, because they are not one trip wearing three names. A catamaran week in the British Virgin Islands is island-hopping inside a small archipelago. A winter on the Pacific side of Baja is a migration. The Sea of Cortez, which is the Gulf of California, is a different body of water on the other side of the peninsula, with its own season and its own risks. Wanting all three is reasonable. Pretending they are the same week is how a plan gets sloppy.
The British Virgin Islands, on the islands’ own tourist board, are an archipelago of more than fifty isles. That is the fact that makes a catamaran make sense to us there. The sails are short. You are rarely out of sight of the next headland. Two hulls mean the boat heels less than a monohull, which matters when the day is a string of anchorages rather than one long beat, and when someone is cooking while someone else is still on deck. We are not making a claim that a catamaran is the right boat for every passage. We are saying it fits this one: modest distances, thin water around reefs and rocks, and a deck you can live on.
A few of the places are specific enough to name without turning the week into a checklist. Virgin Gorda’s Baths are granite boulders at the edge of the sea, with pools in among them. The tourist board calls that out as a geological shore, not a backdrop. Anegada is the second-largest island in the group, low and aside from the higher islands most people picture first. We would rather have one unhurried stop at each than a schedule that collects them. Moorings and anchorages fill. The courteous move is the one you can actually make before dark, not the one that looked best that morning.
Timing is the other half. The National Hurricane Center’s Atlantic season runs from June 1 through November 30, and the Caribbean sits inside that basin. We would not casually book the heart of those months and call it a plan. Outside that window the easterly trades are the wind you sketch the week around, and a forecast still gets the last word. A trade-wind day and a squall are not the same afternoon. If we go, we go with the reefing habit already in the bag, and with enough slack in the itinerary to sit out a day that is simply too much wind.
Baja is the second want, and it splits in two the moment you look at a chart. The eastern North Pacific gray whale population spends part of the winter in the shallow, protected lagoons of northern Baja, on the Pacific side of the peninsula. NOAA Fisheries describes one of the longest migrations of any mammal: on the order of 12,000 miles round trip between Arctic feeding grounds and the waters of Mexico. Southbound whales pass the U.S. West Coast from November into mid-February. The northbound migration begins in mid-February. Mothers with new calves are the last to leave, traveling the coast between March and May. Those are seasonal windows, not a guarantee that an animal will be alongside the boat on the day we choose.
We are careful not to drag that migration into the gulf. A whale lagoon and a crossing of the Sea of Cortez are two trips. If we go to the lagoons, we go inside the months NOAA describes, and we follow whatever distance, permit, and approach rules are posted that winter. We will not invent them here. Watching is not a right you assert by having traveled a long way.
The gulf itself is why the third passage stays on the list. UNESCO inscribed the Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California in 2005. The property runs from the Colorado River Delta in the north to about 270 kilometers southeast of the tip of the Baja California peninsula, and it includes 244 islands and islets. UNESCO records 891 fish species there, 90 of them endemic, and notes that the gulf has been called the aquarium of the world. The numbers are the part we trust. A nickname is just a nickname. What we want is time on the water in a place with that much life in it, without treating the place as a list of sightings we are owed.
The eastern Pacific hurricane season is the calendar for this side of the peninsula. The National Hurricane Center runs it from May 15 through November 30. We would not casually put a crossing in the middle of those months and call it a plan. A good week there includes a day you do not go. The fishing, if we fish, follows the regulations in force that season. We are not going to print a bag limit we have not read on the current notice.
None of this is a departure date. It is the shape of the want: a catamaran among the fifty-odd islands of the BVI, outside hurricane season, with short sails and early reefs; a careful winter toward the Pacific lagoons while the gray whales are on the migration NOAA describes; and, separately, days on the gulf that belong to the water and not to a scorecard. The passages themselves are still ahead of us. That is allowed. The sail shirts are here: sail collection. The fish shirts are here: fish collection.