There are many ways to travel to Mexico by boat. Some people join large rallies out of Southern California like the Baja Ha-Ha or the FUBAR rally for power boats, I suppose for the cameraderie and planning that an organized event provides. Other folks buddy-boat with one or two other vessels for short passages or an entire trip. Still others (like yours truly) prefer traveling solo most of the time and leapfrog from destination to destination with other like-minded vessels – the most informal of buddy-boating.
Entering Mexico, a boat checks in with the Customs and Immigration authorities at the boat’s first port of entry. For folks participating in the Baja Ha-Ha, who anchor in one or two places but stop at no port of entry until Cabo San Lucas, about 700 miles from the US border, they check in at Cabo. Sport fishermen, on the other hand, might have Isla Cedros, about 250 miles from the US border, as their first port of entry. For us, we turned left as soon as we crossed the US border and officially entered Mexico at Ensenada. We had a great time and I would recommend Ensenada to anyone.
Regardless of what the charts and some guide books say, it’s about 60 miles from San Diego to Ensenada. Plan your daytime arrival in Ensenada based on this 60-mile distance, or you’ll end up like us, hove-to off Punta Salsipuedes at 0300 waiting for dawn. Heh.
We had to wait all of October for hurricane season to end and receive our insurance company’s blessing to proceed further south no earlier than November 1, so we chose to spend the whole month at Hotel Coral and Marina in Ensenada. Marina guests get free use of the pool and gym facilities, restaurant and bar discounts, and for a modest US$40.00 fee, Fito the Harbormaster helps you with your check-in to Mexico and even provides a driver to take you to and from the downtown government offices to help you complete the paperwork, saving you at least a few hours of your precious hang-time. Sweet. And believe you me, you will need help; some of the information the entry forms ask for is not intuitively obvious. Like, in the box on the line below “boat type” the form asks for “color” – but it’s not the color of your boat they‘re interested in, it’s the color of your boat’s engine. (Say what?) When you officially check in with the government authorities, there will be the usual government fees – bring both pesos and US dollars as some fees are acceptable only in one currency or the other.
Once you’ve checked in you can settle down and really enjoy Ensenada. If you’re lucky, a friend will loan you a copy of Lonnie Ryan’s “The 90 Day Yacht Club Guide to Ensenada,“ but even if you don’t have such a friend (hi, Lee!) you can still succeed by buying a street map of Ensenada and the surrounding area, and taking the time to look around. Ensenada is a total restaurant town – we were there a whole month and neither we nor anyone we spoke to had a bad meal anywhere – whether we ate at a streetside taco stand, a seafood restaurant (of which there are many), a Chinese buffet (Calle 6. & Castillo, as I recall), or the pricier Antares Restaurant at Hotel Coral (outstanding menu, terrific brunch). If you prefer cooking your own fresh fish, you buy it like the Propane Chef does at the mercado de mariscos (fish market) 
near the commercial docks or by backtracking 2 blocks from where the buses stop on Avenida Marcheros. The Propane Chef even cooked his first fresh octopus (pulpo) that he had bought from the mercado de mariscos. For those of you familiar with Seattle, it’s similar to the Pike Place fish market, except without the theatrics.
And then there’s the Mexican wine. A few miles to the north and west-ish from Ensenada, heading inland from the town of El Sauzal, is the Valle de Guadalupe, Baja California’s wine country. We got a chance to piggy-back a ride in a rental car with Geoff and Linda of the sailing vessel Curare, whom we met on the Coral Marina docks; we took a day trip to the Guadalupe Valley and all came back with mucho vino. What a fine day that was. 
The Baja vineyards are old – perhaps started from vines first brought to this area by the Spanish missionaries – but the wineries are all fairly new. You have relatively large, established wineries like Chateau Domecq, Chateau Camou and Bodegas de Santo Tomas, and some newer, smaller wineries like Vinos Fuentes and Bibayoff (not quite sure why there is a Russian history in Baja California, but there is). Bottom line: the Baja wines are very good, you can pay as much or as little for a bottle as you care to, and they compete very well with their California counterparts. Get you some of that.
You can have a great time avoiding Ensenada’s tourist-oriented businesses in Gringo Gulch near the cruise ship port, instead learning the bus routes to get you downtown (6.50 pesos – roughly 60 US cents – for a one-zone fare), then provisioning your boat by going to either the downtown Calimax or Gigante sooper marts and swinging by Tortilleria Renteria (best tortilla makers in town – Calle Segundo & Gastelum) and Panaderia Mexicana (the bakery on Gastelum just before Calle Segunda) and taking a taxi back to the marina with your haul. In addition to tortillas hot off the conveyor belt, Tortilleria Renteria sells ready-made masa for tamales, chips made from their own tortillas, tortilla presses (check out the wooden ones, man) and sundry tableware and sweets. Visiting Renteria is a total event. Further from downtown there is the greatest of all Ensenada sooper marts, Comercial Mexicana, which is sort of like a Mexican Fred Meyer with fancier food, and therefore a culinary Disneyland to the Propane Chef.
Ensenada also has events happening all the time. Road races, sailing events, language classes – it‘s great. The “Baja Times” is an English-language bimonthly newspaper that covers most of the goings-on, and that’s how we learned about the annual Aqua Baja (I called it the FishFest) at the Riviera Cultural Center, 
a 1930s-era hotel/casino reincarnated as a museum and convention center. The FishFest featured live music, and booths offering samples of local restaurants’ seafood dishes, wines and other goodies. Well worth the US$20 entrance fee and ticket purchases. Plus we got to drink margaritas at the bar that claims it invented the drink (bartender dude has a generous pour), and imagine Al Capone & Errol Flynn hanging out nearby. But not at the same table.
Being comfortable speaking a few phrases in Spanish opens up a lot of doors – the Ensenadans we met went out of their way to make things easy for us, and speak better English than GB and I speak Spanish, which is a tad embarrassing, this being their country and us being guests. Unfortunately, with these near-perfect circumstances for getting to know a new country, few visiting boaters we met in Ensenada seemed to take full advantage of what Ensenada has to offer. We rarely saw other gringos walking along the streets or going into the stores we did. GB even met a fellow boater from San Diego who had berthed his boat in Ensenada for a full year, and had never once gone to a local market to buy groceries – he just drove from his home in San Diego each time he visited his boat, with coolers full of whatever food he and his wife felt they needed. I guess everyone’s approach to foreign travel is different.
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