Early on Saturday morning we checked the engine oil and raw water intake strainer to prepare to motor back to Barra de Navidad, and found that both were fine. We anticipated a 2-hour motor back around the point we had rounded in the same time frame on our way up. In this part of the Mexican Riviera the wind and swells are usually from the northwest and would favor our passage, but the water in the bay was absolutely calm; so we assumed we would have no need for the sails.
Imagine our surprise when we had motored out for half an hour and found a 14-knot wind coming from the southeast (our primary direction), and swells coming from two directions – the larger ones from the northwest and smaller ones coming from the southeast, where they got together occasionally and showered the deck with salty spray from colliding with the bow. I immediately saw an opportunity to save fuel and actually do some sailing; so we quickly raised the sails, shut off the engine, and beat upwind to get around the point. Although our speed was actually greater than it would have been with the engine at times, we were faced with having to zigzag upwind and fight the swells. I was thoroughly enjoying the opportunity to sail, after weeks of mostly motoring, but Sheilagh was rushing below to pick up the items we hadn’t lashed down that had dropped off the shelves and tables and were sliding about on the floor. We had forgotten what it was like to live on a 15-20° slant, and we resolved to batten down everything in the future. I was just disappointed that we weren’t heading northwest to take advantage of the wind and seas, knowing that we would probably be bucking a northwest wind when we finally decided to go north.
We finally made it into the lagoon after three and a half hours (versus the 2.5 hours we had anticipated), and easily found a good anchoring position. We met our friends, Ed and Cornelia of our sister-ship A Cappella, for an afternoon of sunbathing and swimming in the hotel resort that is only 10% full most of the time (which I mentioned in an earlier blog). We are all dedicated meat-eaters; so we got together that evening for ribs at a recommended restaurant overlooking the bay. There we started with happy-hour Margaritas (two apiece if you want happy-hour prices – no splitting one order in two) as we watched the sun descend into the sea. Once again we failed to see the “green flash,” which is a phenomenon that is supposed to happen at the moment the sun sets on a perfectly flat sea when there are no clouds between the viewer and the sun.
Let me digress here a moment. Sheilagh and I have been looking for the “green flash” since our first cocktail hour in Hawaii, when I was stationed there in the Navy in 1971. That’s 37 years of looking for a phenomenon that I am beginning to believe doesn’t really exist. In fact, I think it was Sheilagh who suggested to the group this night that anyone who has really seen a “green flash” was probably drinking a record number of Grasshoppers before seeing it. Although the “green flash” may be a way for bars to sell more drinks to us gullible imbibers during sunset every day, we still feel it our duty to probe the phenomenon at every opportunity. I might mention that a couple of young people at a table next to ours both had their cameras poised to capture the “green flash,” which indicates that this legend lives on. They were disappointed as well.
That night we also watched the movie, Babel, in the hotel’s theater (free of charge), where the crowd was composed of our foursome and one other cruising couple. I understand the movie received some awards from the Golden Globes and the Academy when it came out, but to me it was another example of Hollywood attempting to impose its view of the world on those of us who wouldn’t pay to see what they have to say. Sheilagh’s comment was that the chairs were uncomfortable but the movie was free.
Related to movies, I noticed on the internet that the Academy Awards were presented this weekend. Neither Sheilagh nor I had seen 80% of the awarded films and the truth is we didn’t really care. We haven’t seen a new release since late summer, along with most of the other cruisers. But then again it’s not as if we have to keep up with the “water cooler” discussions which were an essential part of the workaday world for us. When we do get back to the “real world,” we wouldn’t let the Academy Awards dictate what we will want to see anyway. I can remember way back when Gone with the Wind won a lot of awards and was actually a great movie (okay, maybe 50 years is a long way to go back), but I haven’t been that impressed in recent years. It’s as if the members of the Academy are set on making sure the awards are given to movies that are 1) not commercial successes and 2) have a politically correct message – whatever that happens to be at the time. Just another reason why we are escaping to this cruising lifestyle!
Yesterday we learned on the Amigo Net (the wide area net that covers all of Western Mexico) that the water temperature at Zihuatanejo was 69°, which is quite a bit colder than usual. Apparently this is a La Niña year with the Pacific Ocean registering a bit colder than normal. It makes one wonder about the “global warming” phenomenon and the appropriateness/timing of awarding the Oscar (notice the tie-in to the previous paragraph) to Al Gore last year for his less-than-scientific attempt at spreading fear and consternation. It appears that many of the cruisers are deciding that it’s not worth it to go any further south in Mexico this year, because it doesn’t appear to get much warmer going in that direction. The other reported fact that was keeping the boating community out of the water was a 10’ crocodile that was seen swimming around the anchored boats in Zihuatanejo. Glad I didn’t clean the bottom of the boat there! Someone mentioned that crocodiles can’t hurt you when you are both underwater, because they only open their jaws when they are on the surface. I will not be testing that theory with my body!
Sheilagh made another one of her famous key lime pies today, which I was looking forward to consuming single-handedly – with some assistance from her. Imagine my surprise when she mentioned that she owed a piece of pie to a couple of friends; so we couldn’t touch it until we could set up a desert-tasting with them. As she was discussing this with the individuals in question, she was overheard by another set of cruisers, who reminded her that she had promised them a taste some time ago. This entire discussion ended up with a planned potluck on Wednesday evening that included at least five couples, if not more, and the need for Sheilagh to make another key lime pie to go with the first. Needless to say, I have not had a chance to taste the pie yet, although I have had to suffer the delicious smells for over a day now.
This reminds me that Sheilagh has a tendency to promise things in order to force goals on herself to do things she really wants to do. This creates a sense of urgency in her that helps her accomplish a lot of very ambitious goals. She seems to forget about the anxiety she causes herself as part of this process, and the exhaustion that sets in when the goal in question is more difficult than she had expected or takes longer than anticipated. I keep reminding her of our pre-political-correctness marriage vows in which she promised to “love, honor, and OBEY” me, but she feels no drive to meet that goal, I notice. I guess a commitment to make pies has more clout with her than living up to the obedience portion of her marriage vows. Sheilagh’s comment on this paragraph is “the pie is easier to swallow!” Not a bad comeback.
I bought a small anchor from another cruiser in Tenacatita to use with the dinghy when we tie up to the rock jetty at the Sands Hotel here in the Barra Lagoon. We noticed that the rock jetty, with shells imbedded in it, had scraped a hole in our dinghy the last time we were here. We toss out the anchor behind the dinghy to hold it away from the jetty, and it has been working very well. Yesterday we heard a knock on the side of our boat and a shout “Ahoy, Aurora.” There alongside was the cruiser who had sold me the anchor along with his wife in their dinghy. He was asking if there was any way he could buy the anchor back from me, as he had not realized that he might need it down here. We cruisers try to be accommodating, but a purchase is a purchase, and I “traded 15 coconuts” for that anchor. An earlier blog explained the fact that we are not allowed to buy or sell anything in Mexico, we can only trade. Therefore we “trade for coconuts” when we are exchanging money for an item. I did not sell it back to the original owner.
When we originally set out, most of us stocked up on items that we heard would be necessary to cruising, but you can’t have everything on a 42’ boat. Some of the items we decided not to bring down until we had some experience were folding bikes, kayaks, surfboards – generally anything bulky. Bikes need to be carried in sealed plastic bags in the lazarette to prevent rust and corrosion and they are not all that beneficial on the cobblestone roads that are prevalent in Mexico. Some cruisers carry kayaks and surfboards attached to the lifeline stanchions around the boat, but these can be a real problem in bad weather. They have a tendency to be torn off their mountings by high winds or strong seas and can have the same destructive power as an unguided missile. They are certainly not appropriate for heading across the Pacific, but they could be very handy in the Sea of Cortez or in the Virgin Islands.
Since we have decided to stay in the Sea of Cortez we may rethink our purchase of a kayak for getting some exercise and poking around in small bays. There are actually collapsible kayaks that take up very little room in the hold and can be inflated relatively easily. We have also ordered some arched shading panels that will cover most of our deck from front to back to keep the hot sun from heating up the boat. We understand that these are necessary during the summers in the Sea of Cortez, although we have not had to concern ourselves with this kind of shading during the winter season here in the tropics. We’ll furnish pictures of the shade panels when we finally get delivery of them.
We will be staying in the Barra Lagoon for at least the next blog, but will be heading north again within a week or so. We are still waiting for the return of our autopilot from the manufacturer – it’s only been causing us problems since August (before we set out). Sheilagh reminds me that we have chosen the cruising life to be able to learn to slow down and smell the roses (in the ocean?), that Mexico offers a mañana culture (meaning things will get done tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day), and that this is the ideal environment for helping me to both relax and gain patience. I have a sneaking suspicion that, if I don’t learn patience, I could have a heart attack and Sheilagh would own everything, and damned if I’m going to let that happen. Oops, maybe that’s not the right attitude! More later . . .
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
February 22nd – Tenacatita – Jim’s Blog #26
On Monday we did little more than read, relax, and count the boats that began adding to the population here in Tenacatita – ostensibly many of them were escaping the low water level in the Barra Lagoon as we were doing. From an earlier blog you may remember that Tenacatita has the self-guided jungle cruise from the anchorage to the town of Tenacatita along a slowly moving river. We needed some fresh supplies, and the jungle cruise is the only way to Tenacatita without pulling up the anchor. So, on Tuesday we dropped the dinghy in the water, made it over the bar into the river at high tide, and made our way up the river – not dallying as we did before to see the sights, but with a desire to get there, do some snorkeling, buy some groceries and get back before low tide would force us to drag our dinghy over the rocks at the mouth of the river.
We made good time – about 40 minutes upriver – having to stop and pull ourselves into the mangroves to let a panga go by only once or twice. But when we got to the snorkeling locale some high clouds had covered the sky, making the visibility underwater less than ideal. In usual cruiser fashion we found a couple of beach lounges, bought a couple of cokes, and read for awhile on the beach. As we looked more closely at the lounge chairs we noticed that the support structures were made completely out of rebar with material stretched across the top to lie on. Not only that, these chairs were designed to allow the user to either sit up, or lean the entire chair backwards in a more prone position, or rock the chair back and forth. We were amazed at the imaginative use of rebar. The drawbacks to these lounge chairs were that they were heavy and couldn’t be folded up, but who’s complaining.
As we were sitting there looking out at the beach we noticed a lot of jumping activity in a long line across the small bay. Looking more closely we saw that there were at least a hundred manta rays jumping at the rate of 6-10 at a time followed by another 6-10 in another couple of seconds; so it appeared that there were always several rays airborne at the same time. We heard from someone that this was the mating season for rays, but we don’t know whether the jumping was caused by the males showing off or the females attempting to get away. In the foreground we continued to see pelicans dive into the sea for fish, but apparently the rays were a bit too big for them to handle; so they were left alone.
We had lunch, did our shopping, and got back to the mouth of the river about an hour before low tide. We managed to find the main current, pulled up the engine, got out the oars, and paddled our way out of the mouth of the river and over the bar, letting the current do most of the work. I kept telling Sheilagh to keep paddling on her side and that I would paddle more or less vigorously on my side to keep us in the deepest part of the channel. I have done quite a bit of white-water rafting in the past, even down the Cataract Canyon portion of the Colorado River; so I know what I’m doing. But somehow Sheilagh had become an expert-with-no-experience, stopping her paddling on the port side exactly when I needed her to continue, and telling me to paddle harder when that would have pushed us out of the current. We just managed to stay in the current and have the water spit us out into the bay, rather than have to land and walk the dinghy over the rocks. But I have to admit that I was about ready to trade in the Sheilagh model for one that would do what she was told. Do I come into the galley and advise her on how to cook? No way!
We got over that little bit of relationship building and motored over to a boat in the harbor that looked a lot like a Valiant to ask the owners what it was. We met Cathy getting ready to clean around the edge of the boat and found out that it was an earlier Valiant 40 that had been produced thirty years before, and they had owned it that entire time. She invited us aboard, but we had groceries to unload; so we asked if we could do it another time. She immediately suggested we come over at 5PM that evening for drinks and appetizers. So we came back at 5 with our appetizers and met Cathy and John of Batu. Their boat looked as if it had just come out of the factory, but with homey touches they had added over the past 30 years. The boat had beautiful wood trim that was varnished to a high shine, and a lot of cabinetry on the inside that they or her father (a cabinetmaker) had constructed. We enjoyed a nice evening learning about their travels to Hawaii and Tahiti, and invited them over on Wednesday evening to take a look at our boat.
The next morning we took a look around our boat and decided we needed to do some heavy-duty stainless cleaning on the outside and some general cleanup on the inside, if we were planning to show off our boat that evening. So we pulled out the stainless polish for my use on the topside, and Sheilagh tackled the inside. Three hours later we were satisfied that we had gotten most of the cleaning done, and besides no one works in the afternoon in the tropics. We both grabbed lunch and naps and I went into the beach to get some sodas-and-beer-to-go at the local palapa and see what was going on, while Sheilagh stayed on board and baked bread.
Tenacatita has a long history of cruisers getting together for activities in the afternoon, such as bocce ball, volleyball, Mexican Train dominoes, and Hearts. The main organizer left just as we came into the anchorage; so there was no swim to the beach or walk along the beach to participate in, but I was curious as to how bocce ball is played when it is not being played on a manicured lawn. In this case the small ball is tossed in any direction with the rough part of the beach preferred because the flat part of the beach causes the game to take too long with large deviations in the placement of the balls. It reminded me of playing marbles when we used to chase each other through the tall grass – as opposed to playing with a ring and a group of marbles in the middle.
I watched the bocce ball for awhile and then got into a volleyball game. The sand was so hot we had to keep our sandals on and the wind from one direction caused the net to project out at least a foot or two on one side. But we middle-agers – okay, old people – were not really that concerned about such things. There was very little spiking or setting up for others, just a frantic attempt to get the ball back over the net with as few hits as possible. The general consensus was that the more times we touched the ball, the greater the chance we would blow the return. You could hit the ball as hard as you wanted into the wind and the ball would come down inbounds, whereas you could tap it lightly downwind, and it was likely to be out of bounds. Naturally the elements favored the side facing upwind and the one with the fewest women, since they didn’t want to get down and dirty diving into the sand or show any unladylike sweat.
That night we entertained John and Cathy of Batu on our boat to let them see what the same boat looked like that was built 20 years after theirs. Our later boat was built with a slightly different floor plan and a bowsprit that lengthened the overall boat to 42’. We decided that we both had features on our boats that the other would have liked, but with those features there are always drawbacks as well. We shared some drinks and appetizers and then introduced them to the Mexican Train domino game. Now usually Sheilagh is a terror at that game and shows no mercy, and the last thing you want to do is sit in the position that plays immediately after her. So I managed to get seated in the position immediately preceding hers and avoided much of the damage she can bestow. As it was, John and Cathy learned the game at the cost of hundreds of points, Sheilagh inflicted her damage on them, and I ended up the winner. It just shows you that the key to the Mexican Train domino game is location, location, location.
That night brought a magnificent total lunar eclipse that was observable from Tenacatita between over a three-hour period centering on about 9:30PM (Central Standard Time) with no clouds in the sky to get in the way. I reclined on the cockpit cushions with my binoculars and watched the moon turn from bright gold to a dark red and then back again. I invited Sheilagh to join me, but she stated she was more interested in burrowing down under the covers and reading than observing a natural phenomenon that offered no threat to life or limb. I had assumed that the shadow of the earth would pass across the face of the moon, but this shadow crept over the moon from lower left to upper right, but departed from lower right to upper left – as if it were retreating from its previous advance.
On Thursday we decided to go into Manzanilla to hook up with the internet and see if our autopilot and mail had arrived yet in Barra – we are in Tenacatita at the present time waiting until after the full moon has passed and the low tides are back to normal. Manzanilla is across the bay about three miles and the return trip in the dinghy was quite gusty and wet the last time we did it. So this time we decided to avoid that wet and windy bath by landing on the local beach, walking to the local hotel, taking a taxi both ways and making life easy on ourselves. After a long walk on the beach down to the hotel, we were intercepted by a guard who prevented our entering the main portion of the hotel to get to the desk, but directed us around the outside. If you aren’t wearing a wrist band in the vicinity of the hotel, you are an interloper and not welcome.
We found the taxi stand and found out it would be about $20 each way by cab – a bit expensive over the cost of a couple of bucks of gas to take the dinghy over and back, but we were committed by then. We had a great view of the bay as the cab climbed over the steep hills on the cobblestone road, but we wondered how well the brakes would work with rain on the cobblestones – luckily we didn’t have to find out. We found an internet café in the town that was run by an alternative lifestyle Indian woman from the Northwest Territories in Canada. A stream of what would have been hippies in the 60’s came in while we were perched with our two laptops on one of the tables – the women all addressed as “girlfriend.” We did our business and declined an invitation to come back in the evening for a music program put on by her musician friends – hate to miss that new age (?) music.
On Friday I donned my fins and mask and used the hookah or SNUBA (not sure what the SN stands for as opposed to Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) to clean the bottom of the boat. In an earlier blog I had taken three hours to clean the bottom after leaving it untouched for over a month and had made the commitment to clean it every two weeks. This was the time. I found that after just two weeks there were still dozens and dozens (at least a couple of hundred) baby barnacles clinging to the bottom. While I was down there engaged in scraping them off, I suddenly noticed my vision clouded by a red bloom of some sort in the water. As a result I finished the job of locating and scraping off the barnacles by feeling them with my left hand and scraping them off with the right hand. Barnacles are very sharp; so it was important that I had donned my rubber diving gloves with which to feel them out.
My body was covered with a slick, slimy substance when I emerged after an hour, which I washed off with soap and fresh water while standing on the side of the boat. I don’t think the slime was a red tide – just a plant-like bloom of some sort – but it could have been an alien substance from another planet that works its way into the body through the skin and starts controlling the thought processes of the organism it inhabits. If these blogs start to sound weirder than normal, that could be the explanation.
That evening we had a cruisers’ potluck on a nearby beach, where we were able to meet some new folks and reconnect with some old friends as we exchanged food, books, and movies. Sheilagh’s red-pepper-jelly-on-Philadelphia-Cream-Cheese was easily one of the better dips, but there were a lot of great dishes; so there was a healthy exchange of recipes as well as some admissions that the dish came right out of a bottle or can. Incidentally, we cruisers like hearing that something good came right out of the bottle or can, because that can be something we eat on passages when the slanted deck of the boat in a strong wind makes food preparation a challenge. We said good-by to our friends, as we were leaving in the morning to go back to Barra de Navidad to collect our mail and finally get delivery of our repaired autopilot. More later . . .
We made good time – about 40 minutes upriver – having to stop and pull ourselves into the mangroves to let a panga go by only once or twice. But when we got to the snorkeling locale some high clouds had covered the sky, making the visibility underwater less than ideal. In usual cruiser fashion we found a couple of beach lounges, bought a couple of cokes, and read for awhile on the beach. As we looked more closely at the lounge chairs we noticed that the support structures were made completely out of rebar with material stretched across the top to lie on. Not only that, these chairs were designed to allow the user to either sit up, or lean the entire chair backwards in a more prone position, or rock the chair back and forth. We were amazed at the imaginative use of rebar. The drawbacks to these lounge chairs were that they were heavy and couldn’t be folded up, but who’s complaining.
As we were sitting there looking out at the beach we noticed a lot of jumping activity in a long line across the small bay. Looking more closely we saw that there were at least a hundred manta rays jumping at the rate of 6-10 at a time followed by another 6-10 in another couple of seconds; so it appeared that there were always several rays airborne at the same time. We heard from someone that this was the mating season for rays, but we don’t know whether the jumping was caused by the males showing off or the females attempting to get away. In the foreground we continued to see pelicans dive into the sea for fish, but apparently the rays were a bit too big for them to handle; so they were left alone.
We had lunch, did our shopping, and got back to the mouth of the river about an hour before low tide. We managed to find the main current, pulled up the engine, got out the oars, and paddled our way out of the mouth of the river and over the bar, letting the current do most of the work. I kept telling Sheilagh to keep paddling on her side and that I would paddle more or less vigorously on my side to keep us in the deepest part of the channel. I have done quite a bit of white-water rafting in the past, even down the Cataract Canyon portion of the Colorado River; so I know what I’m doing. But somehow Sheilagh had become an expert-with-no-experience, stopping her paddling on the port side exactly when I needed her to continue, and telling me to paddle harder when that would have pushed us out of the current. We just managed to stay in the current and have the water spit us out into the bay, rather than have to land and walk the dinghy over the rocks. But I have to admit that I was about ready to trade in the Sheilagh model for one that would do what she was told. Do I come into the galley and advise her on how to cook? No way!
We got over that little bit of relationship building and motored over to a boat in the harbor that looked a lot like a Valiant to ask the owners what it was. We met Cathy getting ready to clean around the edge of the boat and found out that it was an earlier Valiant 40 that had been produced thirty years before, and they had owned it that entire time. She invited us aboard, but we had groceries to unload; so we asked if we could do it another time. She immediately suggested we come over at 5PM that evening for drinks and appetizers. So we came back at 5 with our appetizers and met Cathy and John of Batu. Their boat looked as if it had just come out of the factory, but with homey touches they had added over the past 30 years. The boat had beautiful wood trim that was varnished to a high shine, and a lot of cabinetry on the inside that they or her father (a cabinetmaker) had constructed. We enjoyed a nice evening learning about their travels to Hawaii and Tahiti, and invited them over on Wednesday evening to take a look at our boat.
The next morning we took a look around our boat and decided we needed to do some heavy-duty stainless cleaning on the outside and some general cleanup on the inside, if we were planning to show off our boat that evening. So we pulled out the stainless polish for my use on the topside, and Sheilagh tackled the inside. Three hours later we were satisfied that we had gotten most of the cleaning done, and besides no one works in the afternoon in the tropics. We both grabbed lunch and naps and I went into the beach to get some sodas-and-beer-to-go at the local palapa and see what was going on, while Sheilagh stayed on board and baked bread.
Tenacatita has a long history of cruisers getting together for activities in the afternoon, such as bocce ball, volleyball, Mexican Train dominoes, and Hearts. The main organizer left just as we came into the anchorage; so there was no swim to the beach or walk along the beach to participate in, but I was curious as to how bocce ball is played when it is not being played on a manicured lawn. In this case the small ball is tossed in any direction with the rough part of the beach preferred because the flat part of the beach causes the game to take too long with large deviations in the placement of the balls. It reminded me of playing marbles when we used to chase each other through the tall grass – as opposed to playing with a ring and a group of marbles in the middle.
I watched the bocce ball for awhile and then got into a volleyball game. The sand was so hot we had to keep our sandals on and the wind from one direction caused the net to project out at least a foot or two on one side. But we middle-agers – okay, old people – were not really that concerned about such things. There was very little spiking or setting up for others, just a frantic attempt to get the ball back over the net with as few hits as possible. The general consensus was that the more times we touched the ball, the greater the chance we would blow the return. You could hit the ball as hard as you wanted into the wind and the ball would come down inbounds, whereas you could tap it lightly downwind, and it was likely to be out of bounds. Naturally the elements favored the side facing upwind and the one with the fewest women, since they didn’t want to get down and dirty diving into the sand or show any unladylike sweat.
That night we entertained John and Cathy of Batu on our boat to let them see what the same boat looked like that was built 20 years after theirs. Our later boat was built with a slightly different floor plan and a bowsprit that lengthened the overall boat to 42’. We decided that we both had features on our boats that the other would have liked, but with those features there are always drawbacks as well. We shared some drinks and appetizers and then introduced them to the Mexican Train domino game. Now usually Sheilagh is a terror at that game and shows no mercy, and the last thing you want to do is sit in the position that plays immediately after her. So I managed to get seated in the position immediately preceding hers and avoided much of the damage she can bestow. As it was, John and Cathy learned the game at the cost of hundreds of points, Sheilagh inflicted her damage on them, and I ended up the winner. It just shows you that the key to the Mexican Train domino game is location, location, location.
That night brought a magnificent total lunar eclipse that was observable from Tenacatita between over a three-hour period centering on about 9:30PM (Central Standard Time) with no clouds in the sky to get in the way. I reclined on the cockpit cushions with my binoculars and watched the moon turn from bright gold to a dark red and then back again. I invited Sheilagh to join me, but she stated she was more interested in burrowing down under the covers and reading than observing a natural phenomenon that offered no threat to life or limb. I had assumed that the shadow of the earth would pass across the face of the moon, but this shadow crept over the moon from lower left to upper right, but departed from lower right to upper left – as if it were retreating from its previous advance.
On Thursday we decided to go into Manzanilla to hook up with the internet and see if our autopilot and mail had arrived yet in Barra – we are in Tenacatita at the present time waiting until after the full moon has passed and the low tides are back to normal. Manzanilla is across the bay about three miles and the return trip in the dinghy was quite gusty and wet the last time we did it. So this time we decided to avoid that wet and windy bath by landing on the local beach, walking to the local hotel, taking a taxi both ways and making life easy on ourselves. After a long walk on the beach down to the hotel, we were intercepted by a guard who prevented our entering the main portion of the hotel to get to the desk, but directed us around the outside. If you aren’t wearing a wrist band in the vicinity of the hotel, you are an interloper and not welcome.
We found the taxi stand and found out it would be about $20 each way by cab – a bit expensive over the cost of a couple of bucks of gas to take the dinghy over and back, but we were committed by then. We had a great view of the bay as the cab climbed over the steep hills on the cobblestone road, but we wondered how well the brakes would work with rain on the cobblestones – luckily we didn’t have to find out. We found an internet café in the town that was run by an alternative lifestyle Indian woman from the Northwest Territories in Canada. A stream of what would have been hippies in the 60’s came in while we were perched with our two laptops on one of the tables – the women all addressed as “girlfriend.” We did our business and declined an invitation to come back in the evening for a music program put on by her musician friends – hate to miss that new age (?) music.
On Friday I donned my fins and mask and used the hookah or SNUBA (not sure what the SN stands for as opposed to Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) to clean the bottom of the boat. In an earlier blog I had taken three hours to clean the bottom after leaving it untouched for over a month and had made the commitment to clean it every two weeks. This was the time. I found that after just two weeks there were still dozens and dozens (at least a couple of hundred) baby barnacles clinging to the bottom. While I was down there engaged in scraping them off, I suddenly noticed my vision clouded by a red bloom of some sort in the water. As a result I finished the job of locating and scraping off the barnacles by feeling them with my left hand and scraping them off with the right hand. Barnacles are very sharp; so it was important that I had donned my rubber diving gloves with which to feel them out.
My body was covered with a slick, slimy substance when I emerged after an hour, which I washed off with soap and fresh water while standing on the side of the boat. I don’t think the slime was a red tide – just a plant-like bloom of some sort – but it could have been an alien substance from another planet that works its way into the body through the skin and starts controlling the thought processes of the organism it inhabits. If these blogs start to sound weirder than normal, that could be the explanation.
That evening we had a cruisers’ potluck on a nearby beach, where we were able to meet some new folks and reconnect with some old friends as we exchanged food, books, and movies. Sheilagh’s red-pepper-jelly-on-Philadelphia-Cream-Cheese was easily one of the better dips, but there were a lot of great dishes; so there was a healthy exchange of recipes as well as some admissions that the dish came right out of a bottle or can. Incidentally, we cruisers like hearing that something good came right out of the bottle or can, because that can be something we eat on passages when the slanted deck of the boat in a strong wind makes food preparation a challenge. We said good-by to our friends, as we were leaving in the morning to go back to Barra de Navidad to collect our mail and finally get delivery of our repaired autopilot. More later . . .
Thursday, February 21, 2008
February 17th – Tenacatita – Jim’s Blog #25
On Friday morning we got up later than usual, but just in time for the morning net. We learned during the check-ins on the net that Cornelia from our sister-ship, A Cappella, (another Valiant 42) had returned from a land trip and was back aboard her vessel in the marina. Cornelia’s husband, Ed, had gone home for a couple of weeks to visit his dying mother, and he had not yet returned. We contacted Cornelia and got an invitation to get together and share the three-leveled swimming pool at the fancy resort here to which she has access by being in the marina.
Just about the time we completed that radio transmission we heard the French Baker announce that he was entering the lagoon and would be taking and delivering orders. The “French Baker” who sounds as if he is imitating Pepe Le Peu, brings freshly baked bread and croissants of various types to the boats in the marina and the lagoon. He has a panga driver who motors him through the fleet, where he drops off orders from the day before and sells directly from his stock, if he has what a boat wants. We were quite impressed with the service, when we first got here, but the cost of $2 per croissant quickly diminished our enthusiasm for his wares on a daily basis. However, we had ordered a ham-and-cheese croissant and a raisin Danish for this morning; so Sheilagh had to get out of bed earlier than she likes to flag him down.
The day before we had turned in our large propane bottle (that connects to the inside stove) to have it filled, which left us without the use of our stove to heat hot water for coffee. We found a way to make do by heating up the hot water on the propane barbecue on our aft rail that uses small propane bottles for fuel. In a cruising boat it is necessary to have backup for nearly everything we do. We have even heard of cruisers with engine problems who had to put their dinghy in the water with their outboard engine to tow their sailboat into an anchorage or marina in no-wind conditions. At any rate, by using the barbecue on the back of our boat, it meant that we had to get dressed before starting the coffee.
We took care of some internet business, including loading up my blog #23, and then went in to meet Cornelia at the hotel pool. If we had any doubt about the 5-star rating for this hotel, the lavish three-level pool with poolside service on comfortable chaises eliminated that doubt. The pool has slides between the three levels and uses slightly salty water to avoid the need for a lot of chlorine. What was puzzling to us was the lack of people lounging around the pool. There was room for at least ten times the number of people we saw.
We ran into Noel and Ashley of the sailing vessel, Ketching Up, who had dropped off their three sons with Rich and Debbie of Oasis, in order to spend one night at the hotel as part of a Valentine’s Day break. They told us that the cost of the hotel for one night was $450, but they had gone on the internet to Expedia.com and found a price of $225 per night. These are dollars, not pesos, and these prices can quickly wreck a cruising budget. So why is a resort that is only partially full still charging prices that keep the clientele away during the peak season? For that matter we learned that a round of golf at the local facility is $250 a round. When we walked part of the course for some exercise one day, we saw one foursome at most. We were told that it is a private golf club that doesn’t care whether anyone plays or not.
Naturally my cynical mind sees this whole operation as a way to launder drug money (the cruising guides warn us that drugs are prevalent along the coast from here south to Zihuatanejo). What better way to launder money than to declare the hotel to be full of guests at $450 each and the golf course to be full of players at $250 each, despite the fact that only a tenth of the rooms are really full and very few rounds of golf are ever played. In fact, any clientele at the hotel or golf course reduces the amount of money that can be laundered each day. I want to assure everyone who reads this that I have no personal experience with laundering drug money, but I’m getting a lot of ideas from the many crime novels I’ve had a chance to read lately.
The tide has been very low in the lagoon lately and Friday another sailboat ran aground on a sand bar in the channel until some cruisers in dinghies came to its rescue. The depth of the lagoon is only about 7-12’ depending on the tide and the location in the lagoon. At the moment there are some 45 boats in a lagoon that can comfortably fit about 30; so we were relegated to the edge in about 8.5 feet of water at high tide. When we checked the tide tables for Saturday we found that low tide would be 6.5’ above the level of the lagoon. Since the depth of our boat is 6’, we would be only half a foot higher than the bottom at 1:30PM. We checked out the true depth at 1:30 and found that it read 6.5; so we knew the tide tables were accurate. At the time we were coming up on a full moon in four days, and the tide tables said that low tide during that time frame would be at least half a foot lower that it was on Saturday, which would have had us sitting on the bottom of the lagoon. We had some decisions to make, but not before a cocktail party on Ketching Up that night.
About 3PM on Saturday the wind suddenly started blowing at 20 knots through the anchorage, kicking up waves that made it difficult to use the dinghy without getting wet. I was safely ensconced in the boat all afternoon doing some reading, while Sheilagh had taken the dinghy into the marina to join some other ladies to play the Mexican Train game for a couple of hours. I had passed on this opportunity to sit with the ladies and gossip, which is the reaction they surely expected when they invited me to join them. Sheilagh made it back from the marina in the strong wind without getting wet because the wind was at her back.
At 5:30PM we got into the dinghy in our best dress-up shorts and tops and started upwind against the wind and waves to get to Ketching Up for the cocktail party. We tried to dodge the waves and wind, but ended up getting soaked in the 5 minutes it took to get there. Sheilagh had worn a sweater to take the brunt of the spray, but my shirt was soaked through. As we climbed aboard Ketching Up, Noel offered me a towel and a clean T-shirt for the party. Eventually Noel, Ashley, Sheilagh and I were joined by several other drenched individuals: Rich and Debbie from Oasis with their two boys, Cornelia from A Cappella, Louis from Cirque, and Barry and Pat from Pacific Voyager. During the course of the evening we were introduced to a drink called Bushwhacker, which went down very smoothly, and which helped us catch up on all the cruiser gossip that all of us brought to the table. Noel and Ashley’s three sons watched a movie in one of the cabins with Rich and Debbie’s two sons.
One of the items of discussion was the tide and what to do about it. Louis’s Cirque had an 8’ draft and was fine if it stayed in one position, but the wind had blown his boat around his anchor to a slightly shallower area that put it on a tilt part of the day. He had decided to put out another anchor to position his boat over the deeper part of the bottom covered by his current anchor. If all the boats are swinging on one anchor, they can run into a boat that is positioned with two anchors not to swing; so Louis was planning to place his boat very carefully with regard to the other boats near him. We knew we had to reposition our boat but decided to wait until morning to determine what to do.
Early on Sunday morning we pulled up our anchor and began wandering around the anchorage to find some deeper water with enough space between boats to allow us to fit in. We looked all over the place and could find nothing; so we motored to the fuel dock to fill up with fuel, and decided to go to Tenacatita Bay (about two hours north of Barra de Navidad) to wait out the full moon for a few days. We knew that Tenacatita had a depth of 20-30’ in the main anchorage area, and had a wide enough area to handle a lot of boats. When we got here, there were only about 15 other boats, and we found a great anchoring area that keeps us well free of other boats. We also found out that the afternoon sea breeze was actually a breeze, rather than the high wind that characterized the same phenomenon in Barra de Navidad.
So our plan is to sit on the hook for a few days here in Tenacatita and head back to Barra de Navidad afterwards to pick up the parts that are being shipped in, pick up our mail (which should have most of our IRS information for last year), regain access to the internet and friends there, and avail ourselves of the shopping opportunities that location affords. It also means that these last couple of blogs will not get published as quickly as I would like. Maybe I can take the time to make them more interesting before they get published. More later . . .
Just about the time we completed that radio transmission we heard the French Baker announce that he was entering the lagoon and would be taking and delivering orders. The “French Baker” who sounds as if he is imitating Pepe Le Peu, brings freshly baked bread and croissants of various types to the boats in the marina and the lagoon. He has a panga driver who motors him through the fleet, where he drops off orders from the day before and sells directly from his stock, if he has what a boat wants. We were quite impressed with the service, when we first got here, but the cost of $2 per croissant quickly diminished our enthusiasm for his wares on a daily basis. However, we had ordered a ham-and-cheese croissant and a raisin Danish for this morning; so Sheilagh had to get out of bed earlier than she likes to flag him down.
The day before we had turned in our large propane bottle (that connects to the inside stove) to have it filled, which left us without the use of our stove to heat hot water for coffee. We found a way to make do by heating up the hot water on the propane barbecue on our aft rail that uses small propane bottles for fuel. In a cruising boat it is necessary to have backup for nearly everything we do. We have even heard of cruisers with engine problems who had to put their dinghy in the water with their outboard engine to tow their sailboat into an anchorage or marina in no-wind conditions. At any rate, by using the barbecue on the back of our boat, it meant that we had to get dressed before starting the coffee.
We took care of some internet business, including loading up my blog #23, and then went in to meet Cornelia at the hotel pool. If we had any doubt about the 5-star rating for this hotel, the lavish three-level pool with poolside service on comfortable chaises eliminated that doubt. The pool has slides between the three levels and uses slightly salty water to avoid the need for a lot of chlorine. What was puzzling to us was the lack of people lounging around the pool. There was room for at least ten times the number of people we saw.
We ran into Noel and Ashley of the sailing vessel, Ketching Up, who had dropped off their three sons with Rich and Debbie of Oasis, in order to spend one night at the hotel as part of a Valentine’s Day break. They told us that the cost of the hotel for one night was $450, but they had gone on the internet to Expedia.com and found a price of $225 per night. These are dollars, not pesos, and these prices can quickly wreck a cruising budget. So why is a resort that is only partially full still charging prices that keep the clientele away during the peak season? For that matter we learned that a round of golf at the local facility is $250 a round. When we walked part of the course for some exercise one day, we saw one foursome at most. We were told that it is a private golf club that doesn’t care whether anyone plays or not.
Naturally my cynical mind sees this whole operation as a way to launder drug money (the cruising guides warn us that drugs are prevalent along the coast from here south to Zihuatanejo). What better way to launder money than to declare the hotel to be full of guests at $450 each and the golf course to be full of players at $250 each, despite the fact that only a tenth of the rooms are really full and very few rounds of golf are ever played. In fact, any clientele at the hotel or golf course reduces the amount of money that can be laundered each day. I want to assure everyone who reads this that I have no personal experience with laundering drug money, but I’m getting a lot of ideas from the many crime novels I’ve had a chance to read lately.
The tide has been very low in the lagoon lately and Friday another sailboat ran aground on a sand bar in the channel until some cruisers in dinghies came to its rescue. The depth of the lagoon is only about 7-12’ depending on the tide and the location in the lagoon. At the moment there are some 45 boats in a lagoon that can comfortably fit about 30; so we were relegated to the edge in about 8.5 feet of water at high tide. When we checked the tide tables for Saturday we found that low tide would be 6.5’ above the level of the lagoon. Since the depth of our boat is 6’, we would be only half a foot higher than the bottom at 1:30PM. We checked out the true depth at 1:30 and found that it read 6.5; so we knew the tide tables were accurate. At the time we were coming up on a full moon in four days, and the tide tables said that low tide during that time frame would be at least half a foot lower that it was on Saturday, which would have had us sitting on the bottom of the lagoon. We had some decisions to make, but not before a cocktail party on Ketching Up that night.
About 3PM on Saturday the wind suddenly started blowing at 20 knots through the anchorage, kicking up waves that made it difficult to use the dinghy without getting wet. I was safely ensconced in the boat all afternoon doing some reading, while Sheilagh had taken the dinghy into the marina to join some other ladies to play the Mexican Train game for a couple of hours. I had passed on this opportunity to sit with the ladies and gossip, which is the reaction they surely expected when they invited me to join them. Sheilagh made it back from the marina in the strong wind without getting wet because the wind was at her back.
At 5:30PM we got into the dinghy in our best dress-up shorts and tops and started upwind against the wind and waves to get to Ketching Up for the cocktail party. We tried to dodge the waves and wind, but ended up getting soaked in the 5 minutes it took to get there. Sheilagh had worn a sweater to take the brunt of the spray, but my shirt was soaked through. As we climbed aboard Ketching Up, Noel offered me a towel and a clean T-shirt for the party. Eventually Noel, Ashley, Sheilagh and I were joined by several other drenched individuals: Rich and Debbie from Oasis with their two boys, Cornelia from A Cappella, Louis from Cirque, and Barry and Pat from Pacific Voyager. During the course of the evening we were introduced to a drink called Bushwhacker, which went down very smoothly, and which helped us catch up on all the cruiser gossip that all of us brought to the table. Noel and Ashley’s three sons watched a movie in one of the cabins with Rich and Debbie’s two sons.
One of the items of discussion was the tide and what to do about it. Louis’s Cirque had an 8’ draft and was fine if it stayed in one position, but the wind had blown his boat around his anchor to a slightly shallower area that put it on a tilt part of the day. He had decided to put out another anchor to position his boat over the deeper part of the bottom covered by his current anchor. If all the boats are swinging on one anchor, they can run into a boat that is positioned with two anchors not to swing; so Louis was planning to place his boat very carefully with regard to the other boats near him. We knew we had to reposition our boat but decided to wait until morning to determine what to do.
Early on Sunday morning we pulled up our anchor and began wandering around the anchorage to find some deeper water with enough space between boats to allow us to fit in. We looked all over the place and could find nothing; so we motored to the fuel dock to fill up with fuel, and decided to go to Tenacatita Bay (about two hours north of Barra de Navidad) to wait out the full moon for a few days. We knew that Tenacatita had a depth of 20-30’ in the main anchorage area, and had a wide enough area to handle a lot of boats. When we got here, there were only about 15 other boats, and we found a great anchoring area that keeps us well free of other boats. We also found out that the afternoon sea breeze was actually a breeze, rather than the high wind that characterized the same phenomenon in Barra de Navidad.
So our plan is to sit on the hook for a few days here in Tenacatita and head back to Barra de Navidad afterwards to pick up the parts that are being shipped in, pick up our mail (which should have most of our IRS information for last year), regain access to the internet and friends there, and avail ourselves of the shopping opportunities that location affords. It also means that these last couple of blogs will not get published as quickly as I would like. Maybe I can take the time to make them more interesting before they get published. More later . . .
February 14th – Barra Lagoon – Jim’s Blog #24
We left Isla Grande at Ixtapa early on Monday morning, as soon as we could pick out landmarks in the gray morning light, and headed up the coast in a northwesterly direction. We’re on the underside of Mexico at this point where we travel about three miles west for every mile north. We knew we had a 12-hour motoring trip ahead of us in opposing wind and sea to get to a possible anchorage at Caleta de Campos before nightfall. On the way down we had bypassed this anchorage because the wind and sea swells had made it less than a safe place to anchor. In this case we planned to check out the anchorage and continue north all night, if the anchorage was as unreliable as before. We buddy-boated with the motor vessel Mañana all day, keeping them in sight as they did us. They were a bit farther off the coast than we were on a parallel course, and it was interesting how we had the benefit of the current early on, but the current helped them toward the end of the day. We would have wasted more time trying to find and stay in the favorable current, than we would have by staying where we were.
By late afternoon we approached Caleta de Campos a mile or so behind Mañana, and we found that it provided very good protection from the swells we had been up against all day. We both anchored in the small bay, whereupon three small surfers paddled up to Mañana to say hello and collect whatever candy was being offered. We had Jim and Jan over for dinner and found out that we should have a stash of candy on hand to pass out to the kids in these small out-of-the-way anchorages. As it was, Mañana had the requisite candy and passed enough out that the kids didn’t bother us.
Caleta de Campos – a view into the sun of the beach, and a view down-sun of the remoteness of the anchorage
They brought along the wine this time and shrimp arrozo (“rice” in Spanish) that we combined with our chicken tamales and sliced cucumber and tomatoes for a salad. [Since lettuce doesn’t keep very well here in the tropics, and each leaf has to be thoroughly washed in clean water to rid it of possible germs from the irrigation water it gets, we don’t eat lettuce salads anymore.] We had a pleasant evening with them and learned a lot about a rescue operation they had been part of when another motor vessel ran aground and sank near where they were anchored on a previous trip to Mexico. Apparently some twenty cruisers helped refloat the boat in a massive salvage operation over the course of about three days that included the use of 50-gallon drums positioned around the vessel and gradually filled with air to float the boat. There was much more to it than that, but Sheilagh and I spent the entire night checking on our anchor every hour or two to make sure we weren’t dragging it and running aground on the rocks, as the unlucky vessel did that we learned about that night. We have since decided to avoid listening to any cruiser “horror” stories at night before going to bed in the future.
We decided that we would “gut it out” and head straight for Barra de Navidad in the morning, without stopping for the night. We left at 9AM so that we would arrive at Barra at dawn the following day (approximately 23 hours of motoring). Since the prevailing winds are from the northwest along this northwest-oriented coast, we couldn’t rely on the wind helping us out; so we motored at about 6 knots for the entire 23 hours. We still don’t have an electronic autopilot; so it meant that we each had steer the boat manually during that entire time. Hopefully we will get our repaired autopilot returned to us in Barra de Navidad, and the motoring we will have to do in the future will be guided by that device. Jim and Jan of Mañana stayed behind; so we had the sea to ourselves all day. We noticed three sailboats heading southeast along with a freighter further out to sea, but we saw no sea life to speak of.
How do we handle these long periods of empty sea and sky? I have been listening to an “Audiobook” on my IPod, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, which is a lengthy novel about the building of a cathedral in 12th century England – 40 hours of listening, actually. This is one of those books I had wanted to read for a long time, but never had the time to really get into before. Follett goes into the cultural, economic, religious, and social background of the Middle Ages in some detail, and I am surprised it isn’t used as a way to teach the Middle Ages to schoolchildren in a form that would actually keep them interested. I discovered historical novels in high school and have preferred learning history that way ever since. In the course of the trip I finished that book and started on Follett’s follow-up book, called World without End, which covers the 14th century in the same locale in England – approximately 200 years later. It looks as if I have about 40 more hours of listening ahead of me, and I’m looking forward to it.
Even if we had the autopilot working, we have to keep watch and check around us every 10 – 15 minutes, since a 15-knot freighter that was invisible before could be within a half-hour of running us down. This was proven that night when we noticed a faint light ahead of us on our course. We checked the radar and identified a fairly large blip. Then we took a look at our AIS (Automatic Identification System) and saw that it was the freighter, Panamax Otter, with a course and speed that would bring us within a half-mile of each other in the next 30 minutes. AIS is a system that all commercial shipping is required to have which automatically transmits the ship name, course, speed, destination, etc.; so that other commercial traffic can track them. The transmitter is fairly costly for cruisers, but the receiver is only about $150 and can be attached to the VHF antenna on the boat. We connect the AIS from the VHF with the GPS and can plot our position and the position of all commercial shipping on our Nobeltec software. [Sheilagh says I am using too many acronyms, but she also suggests that I should mention that we do all this ASAP.] The software even plots the “closest point of approach” (CPA), so we were warned well in advance.
Sure enough the lights got brighter and we veered a bit left of course to widen the distance between us. If they had altered course to come nearer to us, we would have called them on the Channel 16 emergency channel, using their name, and warned them about our boat. We did that with the Golden Princess on our way south on the Baja Ha Ha near Bahia Santa Maria, since its course and speed indicated it would run right up our tail, if it continued. When you use the ship’s name, the radioman definitely responds, and in that case we told him there were about 150 boats around him in case he hadn’t been checking his radar. In a few moments he acknowledged that he saw all of us and that he was changing course to miss the fleet. We also learned later that all commercial shipping must have someone available on watch who speaks English – similar to the way all air control organizations around the world must have someone on the radios who speaks English. One more good reason to be raised in an English-speaking environment – thank goodness for the British Empire and our own dominance in the world.
Back to the other night, we didn’t find it necessary to call the Panamax Otter, because it maintained its course and speed; so it was easy to avoid. Sometimes these freighters have been known to keep a fairly lackadaisical watch, particularly out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but this vessel was in the shipping lanes, fairly near a major commercial port, so it was probably well-manned in the bridge. It is still an eyebrow raising sight to watch a couple of white lights and a green starboard light materialize as a very large boat in the middle of a black night just a half mile away. It is easy to see how a small vessel like ours could be demolished in a collision with a vessel that large that was traveling about three times as fast. That’s why we keep a watch.
The night watches are actually quite peaceful when the moon and stars are visible, but in this case the moon went down at about 1AM and clouds of smog from a nearby manufacturing region of Mexico blotted out the stars. Then we were in pitch black, with some glows from the land indicating cities or towns. It’s not as if we get the kind of vertigo that causes pilots to lose their equilibrium and crash into the ground, but it is a good thing we have only the two dimensions, because there is absolutely no horizon visible at all in these circumstances. To add to the disorientation, the glow from some of the phosphorescent sea life makes it seem as if there are stars down in the water. We are very happy that we have several tons of lead in our keel that keeps us upright in situations like this; so there is no chance that we will do anything that would cause us to tip over. Incidentally, we are told that this sailboat is designed to right itself even if the waves should tip us completely over. We don’t intend to ever be in waves that would cause us to “turn turtle,” but this make and size of vessel (a Valiant 40/42) was used by a single-handed sailor to sail around the world by way of Cape Horn, and was tipped completely upside down a couple of times without losing the mast or the sails. The difficult part for him was hanging on to supports in the cabin to keep from being bashed around in the salon.
First light came at about 6:30 AM and dawn at 7:30 on Wednesday, at which point we could see the large bluff that protects Bahia de Navidad, and we could avoid the isolated rocks around the edge that could do some damage to our boat. It was a pleasure to finally come back to a bay we had already been in; so we knew the ropes ahead of time. We managed to stay in the channel and keep from running aground, but it took us three tries to set the anchor in the lagoon to avoid being too near the other boats. We heard later that a sailboat had come in a day earlier, had run aground, and had to spend the night tipped over at a 90° angle for the night. The rest of the cruisers in the bay got them off the sand bar the next day.
After anchoring we listened to the local net and then turned off the VHF and went to bed for several hours to recoup our energy. That night we met up, and had dinner, with Rich and Debbie of Oasis, who had farmed out their children, Kyle and Ryan, for the night. It was great to catch up on the cruiser gossip and find out what had been going on in the Barra de Navidad/Tenacatita area. Rich and Debbie have a fine looking ketch and are spending a lot of time refinishing and varnishing the wood trim. We made sure our boat had no exterior wood trim to speak of, and what wood we have is oiled, not varnished. We spend our days cleaning fiberglass and shining stainless steel. However, I have to admit that a highly-varnished, wood-trimmed boat is a “thing of beauty and a joy forever” – well, maybe not forever, but at least until it needs re-varnishing.
Earlier in the evening Pam presented us with a CD of the pictures she had taken of our boat as we finished the sailboat race in Zihuatanejo, which you can see on our February 3rd blog. The evening was a great way to celebrate Valentine’s Day with two other long-married couples, who are still having a great time together. More later . . .
By late afternoon we approached Caleta de Campos a mile or so behind Mañana, and we found that it provided very good protection from the swells we had been up against all day. We both anchored in the small bay, whereupon three small surfers paddled up to Mañana to say hello and collect whatever candy was being offered. We had Jim and Jan over for dinner and found out that we should have a stash of candy on hand to pass out to the kids in these small out-of-the-way anchorages. As it was, Mañana had the requisite candy and passed enough out that the kids didn’t bother us.
Caleta de Campos – a view into the sun of the beach, and a view down-sun of the remoteness of the anchorageThey brought along the wine this time and shrimp arrozo (“rice” in Spanish) that we combined with our chicken tamales and sliced cucumber and tomatoes for a salad. [Since lettuce doesn’t keep very well here in the tropics, and each leaf has to be thoroughly washed in clean water to rid it of possible germs from the irrigation water it gets, we don’t eat lettuce salads anymore.] We had a pleasant evening with them and learned a lot about a rescue operation they had been part of when another motor vessel ran aground and sank near where they were anchored on a previous trip to Mexico. Apparently some twenty cruisers helped refloat the boat in a massive salvage operation over the course of about three days that included the use of 50-gallon drums positioned around the vessel and gradually filled with air to float the boat. There was much more to it than that, but Sheilagh and I spent the entire night checking on our anchor every hour or two to make sure we weren’t dragging it and running aground on the rocks, as the unlucky vessel did that we learned about that night. We have since decided to avoid listening to any cruiser “horror” stories at night before going to bed in the future.
We decided that we would “gut it out” and head straight for Barra de Navidad in the morning, without stopping for the night. We left at 9AM so that we would arrive at Barra at dawn the following day (approximately 23 hours of motoring). Since the prevailing winds are from the northwest along this northwest-oriented coast, we couldn’t rely on the wind helping us out; so we motored at about 6 knots for the entire 23 hours. We still don’t have an electronic autopilot; so it meant that we each had steer the boat manually during that entire time. Hopefully we will get our repaired autopilot returned to us in Barra de Navidad, and the motoring we will have to do in the future will be guided by that device. Jim and Jan of Mañana stayed behind; so we had the sea to ourselves all day. We noticed three sailboats heading southeast along with a freighter further out to sea, but we saw no sea life to speak of.
How do we handle these long periods of empty sea and sky? I have been listening to an “Audiobook” on my IPod, The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, which is a lengthy novel about the building of a cathedral in 12th century England – 40 hours of listening, actually. This is one of those books I had wanted to read for a long time, but never had the time to really get into before. Follett goes into the cultural, economic, religious, and social background of the Middle Ages in some detail, and I am surprised it isn’t used as a way to teach the Middle Ages to schoolchildren in a form that would actually keep them interested. I discovered historical novels in high school and have preferred learning history that way ever since. In the course of the trip I finished that book and started on Follett’s follow-up book, called World without End, which covers the 14th century in the same locale in England – approximately 200 years later. It looks as if I have about 40 more hours of listening ahead of me, and I’m looking forward to it.
Even if we had the autopilot working, we have to keep watch and check around us every 10 – 15 minutes, since a 15-knot freighter that was invisible before could be within a half-hour of running us down. This was proven that night when we noticed a faint light ahead of us on our course. We checked the radar and identified a fairly large blip. Then we took a look at our AIS (Automatic Identification System) and saw that it was the freighter, Panamax Otter, with a course and speed that would bring us within a half-mile of each other in the next 30 minutes. AIS is a system that all commercial shipping is required to have which automatically transmits the ship name, course, speed, destination, etc.; so that other commercial traffic can track them. The transmitter is fairly costly for cruisers, but the receiver is only about $150 and can be attached to the VHF antenna on the boat. We connect the AIS from the VHF with the GPS and can plot our position and the position of all commercial shipping on our Nobeltec software. [Sheilagh says I am using too many acronyms, but she also suggests that I should mention that we do all this ASAP.] The software even plots the “closest point of approach” (CPA), so we were warned well in advance.
Sure enough the lights got brighter and we veered a bit left of course to widen the distance between us. If they had altered course to come nearer to us, we would have called them on the Channel 16 emergency channel, using their name, and warned them about our boat. We did that with the Golden Princess on our way south on the Baja Ha Ha near Bahia Santa Maria, since its course and speed indicated it would run right up our tail, if it continued. When you use the ship’s name, the radioman definitely responds, and in that case we told him there were about 150 boats around him in case he hadn’t been checking his radar. In a few moments he acknowledged that he saw all of us and that he was changing course to miss the fleet. We also learned later that all commercial shipping must have someone available on watch who speaks English – similar to the way all air control organizations around the world must have someone on the radios who speaks English. One more good reason to be raised in an English-speaking environment – thank goodness for the British Empire and our own dominance in the world.
Back to the other night, we didn’t find it necessary to call the Panamax Otter, because it maintained its course and speed; so it was easy to avoid. Sometimes these freighters have been known to keep a fairly lackadaisical watch, particularly out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but this vessel was in the shipping lanes, fairly near a major commercial port, so it was probably well-manned in the bridge. It is still an eyebrow raising sight to watch a couple of white lights and a green starboard light materialize as a very large boat in the middle of a black night just a half mile away. It is easy to see how a small vessel like ours could be demolished in a collision with a vessel that large that was traveling about three times as fast. That’s why we keep a watch.
The night watches are actually quite peaceful when the moon and stars are visible, but in this case the moon went down at about 1AM and clouds of smog from a nearby manufacturing region of Mexico blotted out the stars. Then we were in pitch black, with some glows from the land indicating cities or towns. It’s not as if we get the kind of vertigo that causes pilots to lose their equilibrium and crash into the ground, but it is a good thing we have only the two dimensions, because there is absolutely no horizon visible at all in these circumstances. To add to the disorientation, the glow from some of the phosphorescent sea life makes it seem as if there are stars down in the water. We are very happy that we have several tons of lead in our keel that keeps us upright in situations like this; so there is no chance that we will do anything that would cause us to tip over. Incidentally, we are told that this sailboat is designed to right itself even if the waves should tip us completely over. We don’t intend to ever be in waves that would cause us to “turn turtle,” but this make and size of vessel (a Valiant 40/42) was used by a single-handed sailor to sail around the world by way of Cape Horn, and was tipped completely upside down a couple of times without losing the mast or the sails. The difficult part for him was hanging on to supports in the cabin to keep from being bashed around in the salon.
First light came at about 6:30 AM and dawn at 7:30 on Wednesday, at which point we could see the large bluff that protects Bahia de Navidad, and we could avoid the isolated rocks around the edge that could do some damage to our boat. It was a pleasure to finally come back to a bay we had already been in; so we knew the ropes ahead of time. We managed to stay in the channel and keep from running aground, but it took us three tries to set the anchor in the lagoon to avoid being too near the other boats. We heard later that a sailboat had come in a day earlier, had run aground, and had to spend the night tipped over at a 90° angle for the night. The rest of the cruisers in the bay got them off the sand bar the next day.
After anchoring we listened to the local net and then turned off the VHF and went to bed for several hours to recoup our energy. That night we met up, and had dinner, with Rich and Debbie of Oasis, who had farmed out their children, Kyle and Ryan, for the night. It was great to catch up on the cruiser gossip and find out what had been going on in the Barra de Navidad/Tenacatita area. Rich and Debbie have a fine looking ketch and are spending a lot of time refinishing and varnishing the wood trim. We made sure our boat had no exterior wood trim to speak of, and what wood we have is oiled, not varnished. We spend our days cleaning fiberglass and shining stainless steel. However, I have to admit that a highly-varnished, wood-trimmed boat is a “thing of beauty and a joy forever” – well, maybe not forever, but at least until it needs re-varnishing.
Thursday, Valentine’s Day, we found out our propane was near empty and our dirty clothing had built up; so we dropped them off to be filled up and cleaned respectively. We did some necessary shopping for groceries and then joined our new cruising friends, Mick and Pam of Mola Mola, along with our former neighbors in Lake of the Pines, Gary and Bonnie, (who had been long-time friends of Mick and Pam) for a cocktails on the boat and dinner at Maya’s in Melaque, a nearby town. We had a great time learning about our partially-demolished former house (next to Gary’s and Bonnie’s) that is being rebuilt to grander specifications than we had ever envisioned, and hearing the latest gossip from Lake of the Pines, where we had lived for seven years prior to moving to San Diego. You would need to read an earlier blog to find out how a chance acquaintance at a restaurant in Zihuatanejo with Mick and Pam led to a dinner with our former neighbors at Lake of the Pines.
Earlier in the evening Pam presented us with a CD of the pictures she had taken of our boat as we finished the sailboat race in Zihuatanejo, which you can see on our February 3rd blog. The evening was a great way to celebrate Valentine’s Day with two other long-married couples, who are still having a great time together. More later . . .
Thursday, February 14, 2008
February 10th – Isla Ixtapa – Jim’s Blog #23
On Thursday we hunkered down on the boat, resting and reading most of the day. Then we had a “24” marathon over the next two days of 12 segments of the fourth season of that show (out of 24 segments, naturally). We had borrowed the 3rd, 4th, and 5th seasons from another cruiser and needed to give them back before heading north back to Barra de Navidad; so eventually we will have to find the 5th season somewhere else. We got into the show by watching a couple of segments of the first season, showing Jack Bauer saving the United States almost singlehandedly, but couldn’t find the second season before starting on the third. Then we found the second season in a Wal-Mart down here and will see that next. So we will be seeing the series in the sequence of 1, 3, 4, 2, 5 – not the best way to do it, but it beats Mexican TV. We play the DVD’s on our computer, but project the movies onto a larger screen and a set of speakers that we can swivel from the navigation table to the cabin area, where Sheilagh and I can both recline on separate settees to watch.
If you have ever seen “24” you are aware that every hourly segment ends as a cliffhanger; so Sheilagh and I usually go into a huddle after a couple of segments in an evening to decide if we should continue watching. Usually our tiredness prevails; so we typically see only two segments a night. Every once in a while we will see one of the movies we brought along, usually for the third or fourth time. We can buy Spanish movies in Mexico that display “Inglés” as one of the options on the outside of the case, but we’ve found the cost comparable to the cost in the states. We’ve also found that we have to reset my computer to another country code in order to play the movies we have purchased in Mexico. I understand that if we had purchased a state-of-the-art DVD we would be prevented from playing any movies purchased outside of the United States on it, due to this sort of security. What happened to being part of the international community?
By midnight on Saturday night we finished the fourth season of “24,” and were happy to see that the U.S. was saved from several terrorist plots – but only if the main character bypasses protocol. Naturally anyone in the chain of command above him will only “play it by the book,” and that doesn’t get the job done. As I look back on the career I had, I don’t recall the world applauding when I bypassed protocol to get something done, but I wasn’t saving the world at the time either. I think it is interesting how all of us seem to think we are mavericks, as we take the side of the protagonist in a movie; but I suspect that most of us in real life “play it by the book” to keep some semblance of order and consistency in what we do. The bottom line: I would certainly hate to have Hollywood in charge of protecting us from terrorists.
In one of our emails on Thursday or Friday from out daughter, Kimberly, in New York, she mentioned that the latest National Geographic Traveler had an article on Zihuatanejo, and she proceeded to list a number of restaurants and activities recommended by the article. We had been exposed to much of what she mentioned, but we had passed on seeing a museum showing artifacts from the early days of this Southwestern coast of Mexico. We decided we should get some culture on Saturday, so we proceeded to the museum where we paid our 10 pesos ($1) apiece and got to see a fairly summarized version of the history of this coast, along with artifacts that were found here. There is a strong resemblance to Indian artifacts we have seen in Western U.S. museums.
Apparently, there was trade between Mexico and the Philippines some 200 years prior to the coming of the Spanish, and possibly trade with China at the same time. We assume these were initiated by the countries in the far East, but we really couldn’t read much of the Spanish descriptions. Most of the text was in Spanish, but every so often the Spanish had been translated into English by someone who must have been using a Spanish/English dictionary and replacing each Spanish word with an English one from the dictionary. In other words the translations made very little syntactical sense; so we simply looked at the carvings and the bowls, beads, and other artistic renderings.
It occurred to me (in my offbeat way of looking at things) that the information we derive from archeological digs concerning ancient peoples and cultures is based on those individuals in society who were probably considered the artists of their day – the ones who didn’t hunt game or gather crops or create clothing, or carve the day-to-day utensils that were needed to survive. I picture a couple of hunters in a cave looking over the shoulder of an “artist” painting a mammoth on a wall and commenting as follows:
First Hunter: “Hey, Fred, does that look anything like the rabbit we killed yesterday. That makes us look as if we were battling a gigantic woolly mammoth.”
Second Hunter: “Yeah, Barnie, maybe Art should actually go hunting with us sometime so he can see what a rabbit looks like.”
Artist: “Look, you two, how about letting me get on with showing you as great hunters so posterity will think you really could kill something besides rabbits with those puny spears of yours.”
I can’t help but think that our interpretation of previous cultures has a lot to do with whether the artists of the time were good at their art. Were they attempting to capture realism (as the Renaissance masters did), or emotion (as the Impressionists did), or something from their imagination (as the Modernists attempted to do)? Were they any good at what they were doing, or were these the guys (or gals) who couldn’t carry their weight in the community? How did the community decide that certain of their number were to be fed and clothed while they sat around carving intricate bowls and figures of supposed gods? Were the artists the smart ones who figured out how to get by with minimal work, or were they the driven ones who generated art in their limited free time between hunting and fishing? Were these artistic individuals admired or ridiculed in their own time? Did the really great artwork get destroyed in sacrifices to the gods; so we are left with the second class artifacts?
As I read this to Sheilagh her comment was that I must be a “caveman” to even be questioning these things. Maybe I should stay out of museums in the future.
On the way back to the boat, we passed a tent-like structure with a sign reading “Massages – 300 pesos - hora (that’s $30 an hour and was a real bargain compared to the cost of massages in the hotels).” I decided to check it out; so the masseuse lifted up the skirt of the tent to let me in. There were two tables inside with just enough room around them to let the two masseuses work on two clients at a time. I stripped down to briefs and got a great massage, although the sound of people playing and shouting on the beach just outside was a bit of a distraction. This was not the gentle-music, aroma-therapy kind of massage, but it certainly worked out the knots in my muscles.
We had met Jill and Evan from the sailboat, Aprio, earlier in the week, and they invited us to dinner on Friday night. They have been cruising about a year longer than we have, and that was after five years of hard work restoring their ketch to its original luster – plus a water-maker, solar panels, AC-driven appliances and other modern conveniences. What we envied was the large stateroom at the aft end of the boat with a king-size bed and windows out the stern at the level of the bed; so they could see out without having to stand up and look out a port as we do. The awful truth for us is that neither of our sleeping areas is really large enough for both of us at the same time; so I have taken the forward berth as mine, and Sheilagh has taken the aft berth as hers.
Some will be shocked that after 38 years of marriage we now have separate bedrooms, but there are 5 good reasons for this setup:
5 – We can each stash our stuff in our own area,
4 – I can leave my area a bit messy and Sheilagh doesn’t have to see it (or comment on it),
3 – We can both stretch out without touching one another – important in a tropical environment,
2 – We can read in bed without waking the other one up,
1 – Conjugal visits are that much more interesting.
At any rate our visit with Jill (a former school district supervisor) and Evan (a lawyer) from the State of Washington was a real pleasure, since they have a lot of the same dreams, as well as concerns, that we do. Not only that, they are acting on their dreams as we are, which is a unique aspect of the cruising community that can’t be found in a rocking chair in front of the fire at home. We had them over the next night to try Sheilagh’s new recipe for flan made in a pressure cooker. We’ll certainly see them again in the future.
We learned that it would be easier to get our repaired autopilot shipped back to Barra de Navidad instead of Zihuatanejo; so we had nothing to keep us in Z-town. On Sunday we raised the anchor and moved the boat to a new anchorage at Isla Ixtapa (AKA Isla Grande), where the water is clearer than in the bay at Zihuatanejo; so we could clean the bottom of the boat before heading back north. I got out the hookah breathing apparatus and spent about 3 hours underwater scraping off the barnacles and using a Teflon pad to remove the plant growth. I became very popular with the local fish population as I fed them freshly broken-up barnacles and other tasty morsels from the underside of the boat.
I hadn’t cleaned the bottom for nearly two months, and I was amazed at the heavy growth on the propeller. In fact, on the way over to Isla Grande from Zihuatanejo I applied full power to the engine and could only get 2200 rpm and 5.5 knots. Afterwards, we could run the engine beyond 2500 rpm (normal cruising range is 2500-3000) and at that rpm setting we were getting 6.25 knots. Nothing beats a clean bottom on the boat, and I am now resolved to go over the side at least every two weeks to keep it that way. Sheilagh has not yet volunteered for this duty, but by my doing it, I get a lot of points that can be exchanged for not having to do dishes; so we are both satisfied.
We met our friends, Jim and Jan, from the motor vessel Mañana at Isla Grande, where Jim was also cleaning his boat – but with the use of SCUBA gear. We got together for drinks and snacks on their boat that evening and decided to buddy-boat north the next day as far as Caleta de Campos. The 3 hours underwater today so tired me out that I’m going to end this and continue the blog a few days from now. More later . . .
If you have ever seen “24” you are aware that every hourly segment ends as a cliffhanger; so Sheilagh and I usually go into a huddle after a couple of segments in an evening to decide if we should continue watching. Usually our tiredness prevails; so we typically see only two segments a night. Every once in a while we will see one of the movies we brought along, usually for the third or fourth time. We can buy Spanish movies in Mexico that display “Inglés” as one of the options on the outside of the case, but we’ve found the cost comparable to the cost in the states. We’ve also found that we have to reset my computer to another country code in order to play the movies we have purchased in Mexico. I understand that if we had purchased a state-of-the-art DVD we would be prevented from playing any movies purchased outside of the United States on it, due to this sort of security. What happened to being part of the international community?
By midnight on Saturday night we finished the fourth season of “24,” and were happy to see that the U.S. was saved from several terrorist plots – but only if the main character bypasses protocol. Naturally anyone in the chain of command above him will only “play it by the book,” and that doesn’t get the job done. As I look back on the career I had, I don’t recall the world applauding when I bypassed protocol to get something done, but I wasn’t saving the world at the time either. I think it is interesting how all of us seem to think we are mavericks, as we take the side of the protagonist in a movie; but I suspect that most of us in real life “play it by the book” to keep some semblance of order and consistency in what we do. The bottom line: I would certainly hate to have Hollywood in charge of protecting us from terrorists.
In one of our emails on Thursday or Friday from out daughter, Kimberly, in New York, she mentioned that the latest National Geographic Traveler had an article on Zihuatanejo, and she proceeded to list a number of restaurants and activities recommended by the article. We had been exposed to much of what she mentioned, but we had passed on seeing a museum showing artifacts from the early days of this Southwestern coast of Mexico. We decided we should get some culture on Saturday, so we proceeded to the museum where we paid our 10 pesos ($1) apiece and got to see a fairly summarized version of the history of this coast, along with artifacts that were found here. There is a strong resemblance to Indian artifacts we have seen in Western U.S. museums.
Apparently, there was trade between Mexico and the Philippines some 200 years prior to the coming of the Spanish, and possibly trade with China at the same time. We assume these were initiated by the countries in the far East, but we really couldn’t read much of the Spanish descriptions. Most of the text was in Spanish, but every so often the Spanish had been translated into English by someone who must have been using a Spanish/English dictionary and replacing each Spanish word with an English one from the dictionary. In other words the translations made very little syntactical sense; so we simply looked at the carvings and the bowls, beads, and other artistic renderings.
It occurred to me (in my offbeat way of looking at things) that the information we derive from archeological digs concerning ancient peoples and cultures is based on those individuals in society who were probably considered the artists of their day – the ones who didn’t hunt game or gather crops or create clothing, or carve the day-to-day utensils that were needed to survive. I picture a couple of hunters in a cave looking over the shoulder of an “artist” painting a mammoth on a wall and commenting as follows:
First Hunter: “Hey, Fred, does that look anything like the rabbit we killed yesterday. That makes us look as if we were battling a gigantic woolly mammoth.”
Second Hunter: “Yeah, Barnie, maybe Art should actually go hunting with us sometime so he can see what a rabbit looks like.”
Artist: “Look, you two, how about letting me get on with showing you as great hunters so posterity will think you really could kill something besides rabbits with those puny spears of yours.”
I can’t help but think that our interpretation of previous cultures has a lot to do with whether the artists of the time were good at their art. Were they attempting to capture realism (as the Renaissance masters did), or emotion (as the Impressionists did), or something from their imagination (as the Modernists attempted to do)? Were they any good at what they were doing, or were these the guys (or gals) who couldn’t carry their weight in the community? How did the community decide that certain of their number were to be fed and clothed while they sat around carving intricate bowls and figures of supposed gods? Were the artists the smart ones who figured out how to get by with minimal work, or were they the driven ones who generated art in their limited free time between hunting and fishing? Were these artistic individuals admired or ridiculed in their own time? Did the really great artwork get destroyed in sacrifices to the gods; so we are left with the second class artifacts?
As I read this to Sheilagh her comment was that I must be a “caveman” to even be questioning these things. Maybe I should stay out of museums in the future.
On the way back to the boat, we passed a tent-like structure with a sign reading “Massages – 300 pesos - hora (that’s $30 an hour and was a real bargain compared to the cost of massages in the hotels).” I decided to check it out; so the masseuse lifted up the skirt of the tent to let me in. There were two tables inside with just enough room around them to let the two masseuses work on two clients at a time. I stripped down to briefs and got a great massage, although the sound of people playing and shouting on the beach just outside was a bit of a distraction. This was not the gentle-music, aroma-therapy kind of massage, but it certainly worked out the knots in my muscles.
We had met Jill and Evan from the sailboat, Aprio, earlier in the week, and they invited us to dinner on Friday night. They have been cruising about a year longer than we have, and that was after five years of hard work restoring their ketch to its original luster – plus a water-maker, solar panels, AC-driven appliances and other modern conveniences. What we envied was the large stateroom at the aft end of the boat with a king-size bed and windows out the stern at the level of the bed; so they could see out without having to stand up and look out a port as we do. The awful truth for us is that neither of our sleeping areas is really large enough for both of us at the same time; so I have taken the forward berth as mine, and Sheilagh has taken the aft berth as hers.
Some will be shocked that after 38 years of marriage we now have separate bedrooms, but there are 5 good reasons for this setup:
5 – We can each stash our stuff in our own area,
4 – I can leave my area a bit messy and Sheilagh doesn’t have to see it (or comment on it),
3 – We can both stretch out without touching one another – important in a tropical environment,
2 – We can read in bed without waking the other one up,
1 – Conjugal visits are that much more interesting.
At any rate our visit with Jill (a former school district supervisor) and Evan (a lawyer) from the State of Washington was a real pleasure, since they have a lot of the same dreams, as well as concerns, that we do. Not only that, they are acting on their dreams as we are, which is a unique aspect of the cruising community that can’t be found in a rocking chair in front of the fire at home. We had them over the next night to try Sheilagh’s new recipe for flan made in a pressure cooker. We’ll certainly see them again in the future.
We learned that it would be easier to get our repaired autopilot shipped back to Barra de Navidad instead of Zihuatanejo; so we had nothing to keep us in Z-town. On Sunday we raised the anchor and moved the boat to a new anchorage at Isla Ixtapa (AKA Isla Grande), where the water is clearer than in the bay at Zihuatanejo; so we could clean the bottom of the boat before heading back north. I got out the hookah breathing apparatus and spent about 3 hours underwater scraping off the barnacles and using a Teflon pad to remove the plant growth. I became very popular with the local fish population as I fed them freshly broken-up barnacles and other tasty morsels from the underside of the boat.
I hadn’t cleaned the bottom for nearly two months, and I was amazed at the heavy growth on the propeller. In fact, on the way over to Isla Grande from Zihuatanejo I applied full power to the engine and could only get 2200 rpm and 5.5 knots. Afterwards, we could run the engine beyond 2500 rpm (normal cruising range is 2500-3000) and at that rpm setting we were getting 6.25 knots. Nothing beats a clean bottom on the boat, and I am now resolved to go over the side at least every two weeks to keep it that way. Sheilagh has not yet volunteered for this duty, but by my doing it, I get a lot of points that can be exchanged for not having to do dishes; so we are both satisfied.
We met our friends, Jim and Jan, from the motor vessel Mañana at Isla Grande, where Jim was also cleaning his boat – but with the use of SCUBA gear. We got together for drinks and snacks on their boat that evening and decided to buddy-boat north the next day as far as Caleta de Campos. The 3 hours underwater today so tired me out that I’m going to end this and continue the blog a few days from now. More later . . .
Friday, February 8, 2008
February 6th – Zihuatanejo – Jim’s Blog #22
We are spending another few days in Zihuatanejo as we await the shipment of our repaired autopilot. We had thought of going down to Acapulco, since that place was famous as we were growing up as the place where the well-to-do wintered over. And how can you not want to see where Elvis Presley was a cliff diver in a very forgettable film way back? We decided not to go there, since the cost of mooring there is quite high, and anchoring out is in very deep water – neither of which appeals to us. Moorings are floating balls chained to a heavy weight on the bottom; so all one has to do is grab a line from the mooring ball and that serves as an anchor, instead of using one’s own anchor. In the case of Acapulco the moorings cost about as much as staying in a marina in other parts of the country – and that is not a cost that we have included in our budget. So we’ll wait here and plan to head north in a week or two.
Yesterday we attended a presentation by the Tahitian Tourist Bureau inviting us to come to Polynesia as part of the annual Pacific Puddle Jump. Tahiti is made up of five separate archipelagos, including the Marquesas (The Land of Men – referring to their rugged mountains), the Tuamotus (The Jewel Islands – primarily black pearls), the Gambiers (The Islands at the End of the World – few people go there), the Australs (Land of Tradition – based on their traditional crafts), and the Societies, which include the islands most people are familiar with: Tahiti (the Queen Island), Moorea (the Magic Island), Huahine (the Garden of Eden), Raiatea (the Sacred Island), Taha’a (the Vanilla Island), and Bora Bora (the Pearl of the Pacific). Although they want us to visit, they don’t want U.S. citizens to stay longer than 3 months (Europeans can stay for 6 months) – must have something to do with their being a French-owned protectorate and they don’t like the fact that we renamed French Fries to Freedom Fries a while back.
I flew a number of surveillance missions in the P3 Orion aircraft when I was in the Navy over some island atolls in the Western Pacific, and I have always wanted to actually set foot on those white sandy beaches surrounded by azure lagoons and protecting reefs. Reading James Mitchener’s Hawaii on the way to my Navy duty in Hawaii started my interest some 35 years ago. Sheilagh doesn’t quite have the driving desire that I do, but this presentation made the trip sound very good to me; so it may rub off on her. One of the concerns is that a 3-month visa would not give us a chance to see much of the islands; so why sail for 20 or 30 days to a location that will require that we set out again to another long-distance location in just 90 days? The U.S. is working with the tourist bureau on this, and maybe the new French President, who actually expresses a liking for the U.S. could help to get things changed.
Despite the interesting presentation we’ve decided that we don’t have enough cruising experience to head to the Marquesas this year; so we plan to make the trip next year. In the meantime we will be cruising back up the coast of Mexico to the Sea of Cortez, where we plan to take a couple of trips back up to the U.S. It turns out that we have to leave Mexico before the end of 6 months; so we will be heading back to California during the month of April, in order to come back and start another 6-month stay. What is it with these foreign countries that don’t want us to stay and spend money for longer than three to six months? In the case of Tahiti, we have to put up a bond to insure that we won’t be left penniless in the islands. Apparently we have to buy airline tickets to return to the U.S. before we can even get a 3-month visa.
We have also heard that the summer months of July and August are wickedly hot in the Sea of Cortez; so we are thinking about using those months to visit various family members (our condo is rented out to our niece, Lori – which leaves us without a home for those two months). Now we have to find out who will let us come live off them for a few weeks at a time. We also need to start making plans to have family members and friends come visit this spring or next fall, when the weather is perfect for cruising in the Sea of Cortez. Let us know if you are interested in hanging out on a boat surrounded by perfectly clear water and sunny days every day.
This week is Carnaval Week in Zihuatanejo (yes, it’s spelled that way here) – they take the whole week despite the fact that Ash Wednesday is supposed to be the start of Lent, when there should be no celebrating. The loud music started on Tuesday evening, which also happened to be a national holiday (to celebrate the Mexican Constitution, I believe). On Wednesday we dinghied in to the beach and followed the crowd to the town square, where a platform had been erected as a stage for the festivities. At about 7PM we witnessed a small parade that had groups of pre-school kids dressed up in costumes and being shepherded by their mothers between motor vehicles with large boom boxes directed out the back.
Apparently the kids had been trained to perform gyrations to the sound of the music in the truck immediately preceding their group, but the music from all the trucks came together and confused everyone but the mothers, who performed the gyrations as examples for their children. Some of those mothers had some great moves, but the kids more or less walked along looking around and wondering what all the hoopla was about. Each group of kids had on a different costume, with shiny hula outfits predominating, but the first group of kids had their skin painted a dark color, wore a bone tied up in their hair (actually rawhide dog chews) with grass skirts for both boys and girls, and each carried a spear. We’re not sure if the different groups of kids were supposed to represent different eras in the life of the Mexican people, but we didn’t see how that first group of supposed head hunters fit in.
We wandered about for awhile to try to get into the spirit of the Carnaval, but we were finally driven back to the boat by the noise and confusion. Perhaps we’re a little too old to appreciate the carefree life of the Carnaval, or maybe we’re too aware of how our bodies will feel the next day, if we should go a little crazy. I had always pictured the excitement of the Carnival in Rio or New Orleans as something I wanted to experience someday, but now I suspect I can do without.
I should mention that the day seems to really start for the Zihuatanejans at about 6-7PM, when the temperature starts getting cool. The evening crop of food vendors sets up stalls along the street and entire families get together in the streets and on the sidewalks until about 11PM, when everything starts shutting down. A typical day starts with fishermen at dawn speeding through the anchorage on their way to collect the catch for the day. The permanent stalls are up and manned by 10AM, or earlier when the cruise ship comes in. The last call for the cruise ship returnees is about 2PM, after which many of the stalls shut down serious business until that evening. We often see someone half dozing in a typical shop/stall in a beach chair after 2PM, who will come alive if we seem interested in something in the shop. The children are home from school for the siesta period from about 12 noon to 2PM and then back in school until 5 or 6PM. It appears that this is a great schedule for the tropics, where it is difficult to get anything done when it is too hot. I only wish I could have had a 2-hour siesta every afternoon as part of my lunch time throughout my career, although some will say that my work output after lunch was about as productive as a siesta. More later . . .
Yesterday we attended a presentation by the Tahitian Tourist Bureau inviting us to come to Polynesia as part of the annual Pacific Puddle Jump. Tahiti is made up of five separate archipelagos, including the Marquesas (The Land of Men – referring to their rugged mountains), the Tuamotus (The Jewel Islands – primarily black pearls), the Gambiers (The Islands at the End of the World – few people go there), the Australs (Land of Tradition – based on their traditional crafts), and the Societies, which include the islands most people are familiar with: Tahiti (the Queen Island), Moorea (the Magic Island), Huahine (the Garden of Eden), Raiatea (the Sacred Island), Taha’a (the Vanilla Island), and Bora Bora (the Pearl of the Pacific). Although they want us to visit, they don’t want U.S. citizens to stay longer than 3 months (Europeans can stay for 6 months) – must have something to do with their being a French-owned protectorate and they don’t like the fact that we renamed French Fries to Freedom Fries a while back.
I flew a number of surveillance missions in the P3 Orion aircraft when I was in the Navy over some island atolls in the Western Pacific, and I have always wanted to actually set foot on those white sandy beaches surrounded by azure lagoons and protecting reefs. Reading James Mitchener’s Hawaii on the way to my Navy duty in Hawaii started my interest some 35 years ago. Sheilagh doesn’t quite have the driving desire that I do, but this presentation made the trip sound very good to me; so it may rub off on her. One of the concerns is that a 3-month visa would not give us a chance to see much of the islands; so why sail for 20 or 30 days to a location that will require that we set out again to another long-distance location in just 90 days? The U.S. is working with the tourist bureau on this, and maybe the new French President, who actually expresses a liking for the U.S. could help to get things changed.
Despite the interesting presentation we’ve decided that we don’t have enough cruising experience to head to the Marquesas this year; so we plan to make the trip next year. In the meantime we will be cruising back up the coast of Mexico to the Sea of Cortez, where we plan to take a couple of trips back up to the U.S. It turns out that we have to leave Mexico before the end of 6 months; so we will be heading back to California during the month of April, in order to come back and start another 6-month stay. What is it with these foreign countries that don’t want us to stay and spend money for longer than three to six months? In the case of Tahiti, we have to put up a bond to insure that we won’t be left penniless in the islands. Apparently we have to buy airline tickets to return to the U.S. before we can even get a 3-month visa.
We have also heard that the summer months of July and August are wickedly hot in the Sea of Cortez; so we are thinking about using those months to visit various family members (our condo is rented out to our niece, Lori – which leaves us without a home for those two months). Now we have to find out who will let us come live off them for a few weeks at a time. We also need to start making plans to have family members and friends come visit this spring or next fall, when the weather is perfect for cruising in the Sea of Cortez. Let us know if you are interested in hanging out on a boat surrounded by perfectly clear water and sunny days every day.
This week is Carnaval Week in Zihuatanejo (yes, it’s spelled that way here) – they take the whole week despite the fact that Ash Wednesday is supposed to be the start of Lent, when there should be no celebrating. The loud music started on Tuesday evening, which also happened to be a national holiday (to celebrate the Mexican Constitution, I believe). On Wednesday we dinghied in to the beach and followed the crowd to the town square, where a platform had been erected as a stage for the festivities. At about 7PM we witnessed a small parade that had groups of pre-school kids dressed up in costumes and being shepherded by their mothers between motor vehicles with large boom boxes directed out the back.
Apparently the kids had been trained to perform gyrations to the sound of the music in the truck immediately preceding their group, but the music from all the trucks came together and confused everyone but the mothers, who performed the gyrations as examples for their children. Some of those mothers had some great moves, but the kids more or less walked along looking around and wondering what all the hoopla was about. Each group of kids had on a different costume, with shiny hula outfits predominating, but the first group of kids had their skin painted a dark color, wore a bone tied up in their hair (actually rawhide dog chews) with grass skirts for both boys and girls, and each carried a spear. We’re not sure if the different groups of kids were supposed to represent different eras in the life of the Mexican people, but we didn’t see how that first group of supposed head hunters fit in.
We wandered about for awhile to try to get into the spirit of the Carnaval, but we were finally driven back to the boat by the noise and confusion. Perhaps we’re a little too old to appreciate the carefree life of the Carnaval, or maybe we’re too aware of how our bodies will feel the next day, if we should go a little crazy. I had always pictured the excitement of the Carnival in Rio or New Orleans as something I wanted to experience someday, but now I suspect I can do without.
I should mention that the day seems to really start for the Zihuatanejans at about 6-7PM, when the temperature starts getting cool. The evening crop of food vendors sets up stalls along the street and entire families get together in the streets and on the sidewalks until about 11PM, when everything starts shutting down. A typical day starts with fishermen at dawn speeding through the anchorage on their way to collect the catch for the day. The permanent stalls are up and manned by 10AM, or earlier when the cruise ship comes in. The last call for the cruise ship returnees is about 2PM, after which many of the stalls shut down serious business until that evening. We often see someone half dozing in a typical shop/stall in a beach chair after 2PM, who will come alive if we seem interested in something in the shop. The children are home from school for the siesta period from about 12 noon to 2PM and then back in school until 5 or 6PM. It appears that this is a great schedule for the tropics, where it is difficult to get anything done when it is too hot. I only wish I could have had a 2-hour siesta every afternoon as part of my lunch time throughout my career, although some will say that my work output after lunch was about as productive as a siesta. More later . . .
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
February 3rd – Zihuatanejo – Jim’s Blog #21
[New picture added 02/15/08]
We are still in Zihuatanejo and really enjoying it here. This is a very cozy bay with good beaches, an active downtown shopping area, and excellent weather – if a bit hot at midday. We have been joining the Sail-Fest activities this week to support the cruisers in raising funds for the Indian school, to teach them to speak Spanish. They have to be able to speak Spanish to be able to attend normal schools in Mexico; so they can progress beyond local Indian schools. We plunked down our $30 as a participant, about $20 for raffle tickets, and another $50 or so for several parties and dinners. We also signed up to be a contestant in the cruisers’ sailboat race on Friday which I’ll discuss later.
One of the most enjoyable events for us was the benefit concert on Wednesday evening that was put on at a local hotel/restaurant. The venue was a tree-covered, columned patio, with vines and flowers growing everywhere and tables set up to accommodate about 100 people at several tables-for-ten. A mix of artists took turns performing on a stage with a full sound system. All were excellent musicians, including two male guitarists, a youth ensemble with instruments and singing, a solo male guitarist/singer from Mexico City, a solo female guitarist/singer who sounded like (and included one song from) Carole King, and a very accomplished Mariachi band with trumpets that sounded like pure gold. Each group played a number of pieces as the rest of us dined and drank, talked and listened.
We sat with a cruiser couple, Merry and Dave from AirOps, their guests, Anita and Ron, and a new cruiser couple who had just arrived that day, Pam and Mick from the motor vessel Mola Mola. In the course of the evening we found out that Pam and Mick had retired to Newport Beach from Sacramento, where they had created several health clubs starting with tennis clubs early on. Naturally we gave them the name of Tim and Melissa’s Beach Pit Barbecue in Costa Mesa and Tustin; so they could try some great food when they get back. Then we mentioned that we had been living at Lake of the Pines north of Auburn for the past several years. They apologized for asking, but said that they knew someone at LOP and wondered if we might have met them. It turns out that their friends were our next-door neighbors on the lake, Gary and Bonnie, and they were due to join Pam and Mick on their boat in Barra de Navidad in a couple of weeks. Talk about a small world!
On Thursday Sheilagh and I attended two one-hour talks: one for cruisers planning to go to Panama or Ecuador, and one for those planning to go to the South Pacific. Both were conducted by cruisers who had recently been to those areas. Frankly the talk about going south was given by a cruiser who was less interested in talking about the good points and more interested in elaborating on the difficulties and how to overcome them. Both Sheilagh and I were left with a sour taste in our mouths, wondering why we would want to take on the politics and bureaucracy of Central and South America. The desire to see the Galapagos Islands was a key to our wanting to get down to Ecuador, but the speaker mentioned that cruisers are very restricted in those islands, and that one can often see more by flying to the Galapagos and taking the tours to see the phenomenal life forms and interesting terrain. In addition, the cost is probably less than the cost of traveling out to the islands and back in one’s own boat. That’s something we will have to look into.
We had a very good talk by a husband and wife cruiser team who had been to the Marquesas and very much enjoyed the trip. We talked to them after the presentation and got a good idea of what would be involved. Now we are waiting until February 5th for a presentation by the Marquesan tourist bureau here in Zihuatanejo to encourage cruisers to go west. We’ll see what they have to say and decide on our next steps in this cruising life. After the cruiser talks, Sail Fest had a chili cook-off with a $5 charge for 10 small servings of Chili. There were only about 6 competitors; so there was a chance to go back for seconds for the better recipes. Naturally, the chili that won the competition just happened to be serving tequila shots as part of their “presentation.” Apparently bribery works well in Mexico.
On Friday we participated in a sailboat “pursuit race” with eight other sailboats as part of the Sail-Fest festivities. A “pursuit race” is one where each of the boats takes off at a different time based on their racing handicap, and if everything were equal, all the boats would be approaching the finish line at the same time. What the handicap ratings fail to include is the wind strength, and on this day the wind never rose above 5.6 knots, which is hardly enough to move our 15 tons at more than 2 knots. Okay, so I’m starting to make excuses already. We were assigned to start third of the 9 boats, meaning most of the boats were expected to be faster than we were; so they had to start later. As it was, we came in 6th, beating out the two boats that started ahead of us, and staying ahead of one of the boats that started after us. If we had been blessed with 15-20 knots of wind that day, the order of finish would have been different, but I’m not sure we could have beaten a couple of the boats that were actually racing boats rather than cruising boats.
Aurora, the "Racing" boat approaching the finish line [picture courtesy of Pam Bacich of Mola Mola]
The benefit of being a cruising boat is that we are a comfortable boat to be in when there are strong winds, whereas the lighter displacement boats are very tough on the crew in strong conditions. The tri-maran that won the contest had come from San Diego with the Baja Ha Ha fleet, and I remember talking to the cold, wet crew at Turtle Bay, who were not “happy campers” at the time. They were envious of our Valiant sailboat, which has a reputation for being very dry and comfortable in cold, nasty conditions. So we didn’t win the race, but we did beat one of the other boats whose crew was very vocal about how they would bury us. One of the better parts of the sailboat race was meeting Eric and Robin of Island Venture, who served as crew on our boat. They are staying in one of the hotels on the beach and were interested in racing, since they race a sailboat on a lake near Dallas, Texas. They knew a lot about racing, helped with all the work of steering and changing sails, and even brought along some beer to augment our supply. We’ll be meeting them later in the week for dinner together and so they can show us the part of Zihuatanejo that they know well from ten years of vacationing here every winter.
As we were anchoring the boat after the race, we heard the shout of “Mail Call, Mail Call,” and looked over to see that the motor vessel, Wahoo, with Lynn and Mark had just arrived with our mail from Barra de Navidad. We delivered our crew to their beach and then came back to reimburse Wahoo for the customs fees they advanced for us and to collect the mail that had accumulated since December 19th when we last had our mail forwarded. That night we sat down to catch up on mail and to see what had cost us $100 in customs fees. Our freight forwarder had screened the mail quite a bit, but we were still stuck with a lot of junk mail relating to project management magazines and seminars for me, therapy magazines and professional classes for Sheilagh, ads for everything, etc. We figure that 85% of our mail was junk. We also learned that the orthotic sandals I had ordered from a Podiatrist, which hadn’t been in stock when we left, was charged $100 in customs because the part of the sandals which held the orthotics had been made in China, and were not part of the NAFTA agreement. I have yet to see the benefits of NAFTA to U.S. citizens based on my experience in Mexico.
Saturday we slept in to help recover from the sailboat race. There is a reason why cruisers attempt to sail in one direction with the wind behind them most of the time – changing sails on a cruising sailboat is a lot of work. The sails are made of heavier material than those of racing boats because we have to make do with fewer sails that have to stand up to any kind of wind. Racing boats typically have several suits of sails so they can use the lightest ones on light-wind days. And they also have a lot of strong crewmen to help them change the sails as often as they need to. We have not-so-strong crewpersons who have to change three sails – main, jib, and staysail – every time we jibe or come about. That day, the boats that weren’t resting up, conducted a parade around this bay and the next one over, Ixtapa, with passengers who paid $25 apiece for the Sail-Fest charity to ride along. That parade took over 5 hours, and we were happy that we had paid our dues the day before. Naturally the wind was about double the strength on Saturday than it was on Friday, but the parade was a motoring affair; so no one benefited from the increased wind.
I noticed, as I was resting up on Saturday, that the white band around my arm has now become the same tan color as the rest of my arm. This is a significant step in the retirement process, because it indicates that I seldom wear my watch anymore. Some cruisers brag that they took off their watch when they retired and flipped it into the ocean as a way to salute their new status. I keep mine available so I can remember that the rest of the world still has to work from at least 9 to 5 every day! Well, that’s not really true, but I do remember friends, family, and co-workers quite often and say a prayer that you will all have the same opportunity as Sheilagh and I to pursue your dreams someday. More later . . .
We are still in Zihuatanejo and really enjoying it here. This is a very cozy bay with good beaches, an active downtown shopping area, and excellent weather – if a bit hot at midday. We have been joining the Sail-Fest activities this week to support the cruisers in raising funds for the Indian school, to teach them to speak Spanish. They have to be able to speak Spanish to be able to attend normal schools in Mexico; so they can progress beyond local Indian schools. We plunked down our $30 as a participant, about $20 for raffle tickets, and another $50 or so for several parties and dinners. We also signed up to be a contestant in the cruisers’ sailboat race on Friday which I’ll discuss later.
One of the most enjoyable events for us was the benefit concert on Wednesday evening that was put on at a local hotel/restaurant. The venue was a tree-covered, columned patio, with vines and flowers growing everywhere and tables set up to accommodate about 100 people at several tables-for-ten. A mix of artists took turns performing on a stage with a full sound system. All were excellent musicians, including two male guitarists, a youth ensemble with instruments and singing, a solo male guitarist/singer from Mexico City, a solo female guitarist/singer who sounded like (and included one song from) Carole King, and a very accomplished Mariachi band with trumpets that sounded like pure gold. Each group played a number of pieces as the rest of us dined and drank, talked and listened.
We sat with a cruiser couple, Merry and Dave from AirOps, their guests, Anita and Ron, and a new cruiser couple who had just arrived that day, Pam and Mick from the motor vessel Mola Mola. In the course of the evening we found out that Pam and Mick had retired to Newport Beach from Sacramento, where they had created several health clubs starting with tennis clubs early on. Naturally we gave them the name of Tim and Melissa’s Beach Pit Barbecue in Costa Mesa and Tustin; so they could try some great food when they get back. Then we mentioned that we had been living at Lake of the Pines north of Auburn for the past several years. They apologized for asking, but said that they knew someone at LOP and wondered if we might have met them. It turns out that their friends were our next-door neighbors on the lake, Gary and Bonnie, and they were due to join Pam and Mick on their boat in Barra de Navidad in a couple of weeks. Talk about a small world!
On Thursday Sheilagh and I attended two one-hour talks: one for cruisers planning to go to Panama or Ecuador, and one for those planning to go to the South Pacific. Both were conducted by cruisers who had recently been to those areas. Frankly the talk about going south was given by a cruiser who was less interested in talking about the good points and more interested in elaborating on the difficulties and how to overcome them. Both Sheilagh and I were left with a sour taste in our mouths, wondering why we would want to take on the politics and bureaucracy of Central and South America. The desire to see the Galapagos Islands was a key to our wanting to get down to Ecuador, but the speaker mentioned that cruisers are very restricted in those islands, and that one can often see more by flying to the Galapagos and taking the tours to see the phenomenal life forms and interesting terrain. In addition, the cost is probably less than the cost of traveling out to the islands and back in one’s own boat. That’s something we will have to look into.
We had a very good talk by a husband and wife cruiser team who had been to the Marquesas and very much enjoyed the trip. We talked to them after the presentation and got a good idea of what would be involved. Now we are waiting until February 5th for a presentation by the Marquesan tourist bureau here in Zihuatanejo to encourage cruisers to go west. We’ll see what they have to say and decide on our next steps in this cruising life. After the cruiser talks, Sail Fest had a chili cook-off with a $5 charge for 10 small servings of Chili. There were only about 6 competitors; so there was a chance to go back for seconds for the better recipes. Naturally, the chili that won the competition just happened to be serving tequila shots as part of their “presentation.” Apparently bribery works well in Mexico.
On Friday we participated in a sailboat “pursuit race” with eight other sailboats as part of the Sail-Fest festivities. A “pursuit race” is one where each of the boats takes off at a different time based on their racing handicap, and if everything were equal, all the boats would be approaching the finish line at the same time. What the handicap ratings fail to include is the wind strength, and on this day the wind never rose above 5.6 knots, which is hardly enough to move our 15 tons at more than 2 knots. Okay, so I’m starting to make excuses already. We were assigned to start third of the 9 boats, meaning most of the boats were expected to be faster than we were; so they had to start later. As it was, we came in 6th, beating out the two boats that started ahead of us, and staying ahead of one of the boats that started after us. If we had been blessed with 15-20 knots of wind that day, the order of finish would have been different, but I’m not sure we could have beaten a couple of the boats that were actually racing boats rather than cruising boats.
Aurora, the "Racing" boat approaching the finish line [picture courtesy of Pam Bacich of Mola Mola]The benefit of being a cruising boat is that we are a comfortable boat to be in when there are strong winds, whereas the lighter displacement boats are very tough on the crew in strong conditions. The tri-maran that won the contest had come from San Diego with the Baja Ha Ha fleet, and I remember talking to the cold, wet crew at Turtle Bay, who were not “happy campers” at the time. They were envious of our Valiant sailboat, which has a reputation for being very dry and comfortable in cold, nasty conditions. So we didn’t win the race, but we did beat one of the other boats whose crew was very vocal about how they would bury us. One of the better parts of the sailboat race was meeting Eric and Robin of Island Venture, who served as crew on our boat. They are staying in one of the hotels on the beach and were interested in racing, since they race a sailboat on a lake near Dallas, Texas. They knew a lot about racing, helped with all the work of steering and changing sails, and even brought along some beer to augment our supply. We’ll be meeting them later in the week for dinner together and so they can show us the part of Zihuatanejo that they know well from ten years of vacationing here every winter.
As we were anchoring the boat after the race, we heard the shout of “Mail Call, Mail Call,” and looked over to see that the motor vessel, Wahoo, with Lynn and Mark had just arrived with our mail from Barra de Navidad. We delivered our crew to their beach and then came back to reimburse Wahoo for the customs fees they advanced for us and to collect the mail that had accumulated since December 19th when we last had our mail forwarded. That night we sat down to catch up on mail and to see what had cost us $100 in customs fees. Our freight forwarder had screened the mail quite a bit, but we were still stuck with a lot of junk mail relating to project management magazines and seminars for me, therapy magazines and professional classes for Sheilagh, ads for everything, etc. We figure that 85% of our mail was junk. We also learned that the orthotic sandals I had ordered from a Podiatrist, which hadn’t been in stock when we left, was charged $100 in customs because the part of the sandals which held the orthotics had been made in China, and were not part of the NAFTA agreement. I have yet to see the benefits of NAFTA to U.S. citizens based on my experience in Mexico.
Saturday we slept in to help recover from the sailboat race. There is a reason why cruisers attempt to sail in one direction with the wind behind them most of the time – changing sails on a cruising sailboat is a lot of work. The sails are made of heavier material than those of racing boats because we have to make do with fewer sails that have to stand up to any kind of wind. Racing boats typically have several suits of sails so they can use the lightest ones on light-wind days. And they also have a lot of strong crewmen to help them change the sails as often as they need to. We have not-so-strong crewpersons who have to change three sails – main, jib, and staysail – every time we jibe or come about. That day, the boats that weren’t resting up, conducted a parade around this bay and the next one over, Ixtapa, with passengers who paid $25 apiece for the Sail-Fest charity to ride along. That parade took over 5 hours, and we were happy that we had paid our dues the day before. Naturally the wind was about double the strength on Saturday than it was on Friday, but the parade was a motoring affair; so no one benefited from the increased wind.
I noticed, as I was resting up on Saturday, that the white band around my arm has now become the same tan color as the rest of my arm. This is a significant step in the retirement process, because it indicates that I seldom wear my watch anymore. Some cruisers brag that they took off their watch when they retired and flipped it into the ocean as a way to salute their new status. I keep mine available so I can remember that the rest of the world still has to work from at least 9 to 5 every day! Well, that’s not really true, but I do remember friends, family, and co-workers quite often and say a prayer that you will all have the same opportunity as Sheilagh and I to pursue your dreams someday. More later . . .
Sunday, February 3, 2008
January 30th – Zihuatanejo – Jim’s Blog #20
On the day we posted our last blog, January 27th, we left Barra de Navidad for Zihuatanejo at about 5PM, a distance of some 200 miles southeast along the coast. We usually plan our trips by dividing 5.5 (our speed) into the distance to determine the number of hours – in this case approximately 37 hours. Normally we try to stop at anchorages about 50 miles apart, so we can depart at daybreak and arrive before dusk. However, in this case we consulted the guides and found that the anchorages along the way were questionable at best in terms of providing shelter from the swells and wind. So in this case we decided to “bite the bullet” and do the trip in one long stretch.
When we know the trip will need to take place over a night or two, we plan the trip to arrive at the new anchorage by dawn, so we can take longer than we thought and still have nearly a whole day to arrive at the new location in daylight. Planning backwards from a 7AM arrival in this case meant that we should set sail at about 5PM and plan to spend two nights and one day sailing down. We had also noticed that the wind seemed to pick up every afternoon at about 4PM; so that, too, fit into our plans to sail and not motor as much as possible.
So we rested most of Sunday and just as we got up from our naps at 4PM the wind sprang up and at 5PM we pulled up our anchor and set off. We had a very enjoyable sail until about 11PM that night, when the wind shut down and we motored until about 4PM on Monday afternoon, when the wind came up again. On our way down, another cruiser suggested we stop at one of the anchorages on our way down as they intended to do, saying that friends of theirs had said the cruising guides were a bit too cautious in their recommendations on several spots. We calculated that we would be near a small anchorage called Caleta de Campos in the late afternoon on Monday; so we decided to try to anchor there for the night in order to get a good night’s sleep – neither of us sleeps very well on overnight passages because we have to interrupt our sleep after three hours to go on watch for three hours.
As we approached the anchorage, we saw two sailboats at anchor, but we noticed that their hulls kept disappearing from our view as we got closer. There was a 4-6’ swell that caused the boats to rise and fall with no protection behind a headland of any sort to mitigate the swell or the wind. We proceeded in cautiously and began seeing and hearing the crashing surf on the beach just behind the anchored boats. We were contemplating the idea of bobbing up and down all night at anchor with the roar of crashing surf in our ears, and the thought that we might be pushed up on that beach if our anchor failed to hold, when we both decided at the same time that we would prefer sailing on and missing some sleep, rather than take a chance on this anchorage.
We proceeded on our way, sailing until about midnight, and then motoring until dawn. The picture below shows why we need to keep a watch on these night-time passages. If you’ve ever been on a cruise, you will know that the cruise boats do most of their sailing at night, and spend most of the daytime hours in port. This one passed us fairly close by, but we had the vessel on radar way before this, and had a chance to maneuver around it, if there had been danger of a collision.
We made better time than we thought; so we were due to arrive at Zihuatanejo at about 5AM, which was 2.5 hours before dawn. We decided to cut back to minimum rpm on the engine and proceeded the last several hours at just 3 knots of speed, rather than the 5.5 knots we usually make. Apparently we picked up a helpful current that got us in to the bay even faster; so we ended up having to motor around in circles for about 40 minutes before starting our approach into the bay. When the night was just starting to change into gray, we set a recommended latitude and longitude at the mouth of the small bay of Zihuatanejo into our GPS (from the two cruising guides we use) and started forward cautiously.
We have a GPS that shows us the image of a road lying ahead of us (wide at the front and narrowing away from us) with a readout that shows how far off track we might be from the chosen path. We checked again and again as we proceeded toward the mouth of the bay, but we could see nothing but hills ahead of us, while there were buildings and a wide bay to our left. Naturally we rechecked the coordinates from the cruisers’ guides, brought up the radar (which also showed no bay ahead of us), and kept our eyes peeled as the sky gradually turned from gray to orange to blue. We motored at least 45 minutes straight ahead toward the hills, suspecting that the charts and the guidebooks were wrong and veering a bit toward the large bay on the left, until the hills opened up in front of us and there was the tiny bay of Zihuatanejo exactly where it was supposed to be. Sheilagh and I both have a new respect for the early explorers who came into places like this with minimal navigation equipment, no accurate charts, and no motors to help them out when the wind died. We could see how pirates could lose themselves in a variety of small bays and inlets, with no one aware of their presence, until they could spring on an unsuspecting ship.
At any rate we found a good place to anchor near the main town, wondering why the other sailboats and trawlers were anchored further away for the most part. As we were settling into the anchorage and preparing to go below for some much-needed sleep, we looked at the entrance to the small bay and saw a cruise ship fill up the entire mouth of the bay on its way in. The cruisers’ net was in full swing in Zihuatanejo (starting at 8:45AM here) and no one else seemed to be concerned about the oncoming giant of a boat. Sheilagh and I immediately thought that we might have anchored where the cruise ship normally anchored; so Sheilagh broke into the net to see if we needed to move. We were assured that the cruise ship would be anchoring away from the main pier and using their lifeboats to transport people into the town, but I think the rest of the boats listening in to the net could see why we were concerned.
We checked into the Amigo net that morning and learned that our mail had arrived in Barra de Navidad the day after we left. A fellow cruiser, Bill of Raptor Dance, heard that it had come in at the hotel where we were having it forwarded, and, knowing that we had departed already, arranged to pick it up and find the next cruiser who was going to Zihuatanejo to take it down to us. UPS had told our forwarder in San Diego that they had lost our package, and would reroute it to Zihuatanejo when they found it, which is why we stopped waiting for it and headed south. There was $100 duty on the package because it contained something that was not manufactured entirely in the U.S. (what do we manufacture entirely in the U.S. anymore?); so Bill paid the bill out of his pocket. Then he found Lynn and Mark of the motor vessel, Wahoo, who were going to Zihuatanejo in a day or two, and they paid Bill $100 to clear his expenses with the idea of receiving payment from us. All of this was done while we were cruising down the coast; so we had no word of any of it until everything was taken care of and we finally received the message on the Amigo net on Tuesday morning after our arrival here. It certainly makes one glad to be part of a cruiser community that takes care of one another.
After a morning nap to catch up on some sleep, we put the dinghy over the side and went into town to get the lay of the land. As we were preparing to get into the dinghy Jim and Jan from the motor vessel, Mañana, dinghied over to us to say hello. “Starfish” Jim was the electrician (and jack of all trades) who installed our HF radio, tore out and replaced our holding tank, and generally helped us prepare for the cruise while we were both in the Chula Vista Marina in San Diego. He and his wife, Jan, had set out before us to have their boat hauled and the bottom painted in Ensenada, Mexico, and had planned to meet us on the trip down to Cabo San Lucas in Turtle Bay. Naturally the work turned out to be more than they had anticipated; so they were delayed an extra month or two, but immediately headed down to Zihuatanejo when they were finished with the repairs.
We joined Jim and Jan for lunch at Rick’s Bar, the cruisers’ hangout in Z-Town (the short form of Zihuatanejo for those who don’t want to pronounce the whole word – Zee-wah-ta-nay’-ho). Rick is a former cruiser from the U.S. who decided to settle down and make his home here. He sells memberships in his own Zihuatanejo Yacht Club for $50 a year, which entitles us to unlimited internet access for a year, and the run of his bar. Like most such cruiser hangouts, the bar supports internet onsite (as well as out on our boats), a lending library where we can exchange books we have read for others, a restaurant, a band, and (last but not least) a bar. Jim and Jan brought us up-to-speed on where to go, what to do, and what to avoid in Z-Town. As an example there is a Wal-Mart-like store nearby, called the Comercial (with a large orange Pelican as its logo), where it should only cost 20 pesos to get there by taxi. Cruisers always pass along the relative taxi costs to get from place to place in a new location; so we can avoid outrageous fares from taxi drivers who aren’t hesitant to overcharge rich gringos.
As we were walking through town, we passed dozens of cruise-boat passengers who had been deposited onshore from 10AM until about 5PM to let them do all the shopping they might want to do. The Cruise ships depart before the dinner hour; so the local restaurants and palapas only have the lunch crowd to deal with. Since the midday meal is often the largest meal in Mexico, while the cruise ship passengers have their largest meal in the evening on the cruise ship, the restaurants have to do what they can to get the visitors to eat and drink as much as possible before they get back on the ship. Zihuatanejo seems to have a lot of good restaurants, but these don’t do the business they might do if the cruise ships stayed in port for the night. However, there are a large number of gift shops and thatched stalls that sell classier stuff than we have seen in many of the smaller Mexican towns. We don’t have room on the boat to collect stuff, nor the inclination to do so now that we have stripped down our living situation to just what we need. If we were eventually returning to a large house, I can see that we would be tempted to pick up some very beautiful artifacts to fill up horizontal surfaces there.
We came to Zihuatanejo to get information on the trip to the Marquesas across the Pacific, since this is a location than many cruisers use as the departure location for the “Pacific Puddle Jump.” But we also timed our arrival to coincide with Zihuatanejo’s Sail-Fest, a multi-day affair put on by whatever cruisers are in the area to raise money for an Indian school that cruisers have been sponsoring for several years. Apparently the indigenous population is made up of Indians who speak their own language and very little Spanish. This school was designed to teach Indian children to speak Spanish; so they can get into the Spanish-language schools, where they can get a decent education. This is one way that the cruiser community has supported the town, and it appears to be a very successful, multi-year project. Last year I believe the cruiser community raised almost $50,000 and that was matched by some commercial organizations. I will talk about some of what we have been doing as part of Sail-Fest in my next blog, but I am a bit behind on my writing with all that has been going on here; so I’ll get this out soon. I assure you there will be no solicitations for donations, but you will get to hear how we did in the cruisers’ sailboat race. More later . . .
When we know the trip will need to take place over a night or two, we plan the trip to arrive at the new anchorage by dawn, so we can take longer than we thought and still have nearly a whole day to arrive at the new location in daylight. Planning backwards from a 7AM arrival in this case meant that we should set sail at about 5PM and plan to spend two nights and one day sailing down. We had also noticed that the wind seemed to pick up every afternoon at about 4PM; so that, too, fit into our plans to sail and not motor as much as possible.
So we rested most of Sunday and just as we got up from our naps at 4PM the wind sprang up and at 5PM we pulled up our anchor and set off. We had a very enjoyable sail until about 11PM that night, when the wind shut down and we motored until about 4PM on Monday afternoon, when the wind came up again. On our way down, another cruiser suggested we stop at one of the anchorages on our way down as they intended to do, saying that friends of theirs had said the cruising guides were a bit too cautious in their recommendations on several spots. We calculated that we would be near a small anchorage called Caleta de Campos in the late afternoon on Monday; so we decided to try to anchor there for the night in order to get a good night’s sleep – neither of us sleeps very well on overnight passages because we have to interrupt our sleep after three hours to go on watch for three hours.
As we approached the anchorage, we saw two sailboats at anchor, but we noticed that their hulls kept disappearing from our view as we got closer. There was a 4-6’ swell that caused the boats to rise and fall with no protection behind a headland of any sort to mitigate the swell or the wind. We proceeded in cautiously and began seeing and hearing the crashing surf on the beach just behind the anchored boats. We were contemplating the idea of bobbing up and down all night at anchor with the roar of crashing surf in our ears, and the thought that we might be pushed up on that beach if our anchor failed to hold, when we both decided at the same time that we would prefer sailing on and missing some sleep, rather than take a chance on this anchorage.
We proceeded on our way, sailing until about midnight, and then motoring until dawn. The picture below shows why we need to keep a watch on these night-time passages. If you’ve ever been on a cruise, you will know that the cruise boats do most of their sailing at night, and spend most of the daytime hours in port. This one passed us fairly close by, but we had the vessel on radar way before this, and had a chance to maneuver around it, if there had been danger of a collision.
We made better time than we thought; so we were due to arrive at Zihuatanejo at about 5AM, which was 2.5 hours before dawn. We decided to cut back to minimum rpm on the engine and proceeded the last several hours at just 3 knots of speed, rather than the 5.5 knots we usually make. Apparently we picked up a helpful current that got us in to the bay even faster; so we ended up having to motor around in circles for about 40 minutes before starting our approach into the bay. When the night was just starting to change into gray, we set a recommended latitude and longitude at the mouth of the small bay of Zihuatanejo into our GPS (from the two cruising guides we use) and started forward cautiously.
We have a GPS that shows us the image of a road lying ahead of us (wide at the front and narrowing away from us) with a readout that shows how far off track we might be from the chosen path. We checked again and again as we proceeded toward the mouth of the bay, but we could see nothing but hills ahead of us, while there were buildings and a wide bay to our left. Naturally we rechecked the coordinates from the cruisers’ guides, brought up the radar (which also showed no bay ahead of us), and kept our eyes peeled as the sky gradually turned from gray to orange to blue. We motored at least 45 minutes straight ahead toward the hills, suspecting that the charts and the guidebooks were wrong and veering a bit toward the large bay on the left, until the hills opened up in front of us and there was the tiny bay of Zihuatanejo exactly where it was supposed to be. Sheilagh and I both have a new respect for the early explorers who came into places like this with minimal navigation equipment, no accurate charts, and no motors to help them out when the wind died. We could see how pirates could lose themselves in a variety of small bays and inlets, with no one aware of their presence, until they could spring on an unsuspecting ship.
At any rate we found a good place to anchor near the main town, wondering why the other sailboats and trawlers were anchored further away for the most part. As we were settling into the anchorage and preparing to go below for some much-needed sleep, we looked at the entrance to the small bay and saw a cruise ship fill up the entire mouth of the bay on its way in. The cruisers’ net was in full swing in Zihuatanejo (starting at 8:45AM here) and no one else seemed to be concerned about the oncoming giant of a boat. Sheilagh and I immediately thought that we might have anchored where the cruise ship normally anchored; so Sheilagh broke into the net to see if we needed to move. We were assured that the cruise ship would be anchoring away from the main pier and using their lifeboats to transport people into the town, but I think the rest of the boats listening in to the net could see why we were concerned.
We checked into the Amigo net that morning and learned that our mail had arrived in Barra de Navidad the day after we left. A fellow cruiser, Bill of Raptor Dance, heard that it had come in at the hotel where we were having it forwarded, and, knowing that we had departed already, arranged to pick it up and find the next cruiser who was going to Zihuatanejo to take it down to us. UPS had told our forwarder in San Diego that they had lost our package, and would reroute it to Zihuatanejo when they found it, which is why we stopped waiting for it and headed south. There was $100 duty on the package because it contained something that was not manufactured entirely in the U.S. (what do we manufacture entirely in the U.S. anymore?); so Bill paid the bill out of his pocket. Then he found Lynn and Mark of the motor vessel, Wahoo, who were going to Zihuatanejo in a day or two, and they paid Bill $100 to clear his expenses with the idea of receiving payment from us. All of this was done while we were cruising down the coast; so we had no word of any of it until everything was taken care of and we finally received the message on the Amigo net on Tuesday morning after our arrival here. It certainly makes one glad to be part of a cruiser community that takes care of one another.
After a morning nap to catch up on some sleep, we put the dinghy over the side and went into town to get the lay of the land. As we were preparing to get into the dinghy Jim and Jan from the motor vessel, Mañana, dinghied over to us to say hello. “Starfish” Jim was the electrician (and jack of all trades) who installed our HF radio, tore out and replaced our holding tank, and generally helped us prepare for the cruise while we were both in the Chula Vista Marina in San Diego. He and his wife, Jan, had set out before us to have their boat hauled and the bottom painted in Ensenada, Mexico, and had planned to meet us on the trip down to Cabo San Lucas in Turtle Bay. Naturally the work turned out to be more than they had anticipated; so they were delayed an extra month or two, but immediately headed down to Zihuatanejo when they were finished with the repairs.
We joined Jim and Jan for lunch at Rick’s Bar, the cruisers’ hangout in Z-Town (the short form of Zihuatanejo for those who don’t want to pronounce the whole word – Zee-wah-ta-nay’-ho). Rick is a former cruiser from the U.S. who decided to settle down and make his home here. He sells memberships in his own Zihuatanejo Yacht Club for $50 a year, which entitles us to unlimited internet access for a year, and the run of his bar. Like most such cruiser hangouts, the bar supports internet onsite (as well as out on our boats), a lending library where we can exchange books we have read for others, a restaurant, a band, and (last but not least) a bar. Jim and Jan brought us up-to-speed on where to go, what to do, and what to avoid in Z-Town. As an example there is a Wal-Mart-like store nearby, called the Comercial (with a large orange Pelican as its logo), where it should only cost 20 pesos to get there by taxi. Cruisers always pass along the relative taxi costs to get from place to place in a new location; so we can avoid outrageous fares from taxi drivers who aren’t hesitant to overcharge rich gringos.
As we were walking through town, we passed dozens of cruise-boat passengers who had been deposited onshore from 10AM until about 5PM to let them do all the shopping they might want to do. The Cruise ships depart before the dinner hour; so the local restaurants and palapas only have the lunch crowd to deal with. Since the midday meal is often the largest meal in Mexico, while the cruise ship passengers have their largest meal in the evening on the cruise ship, the restaurants have to do what they can to get the visitors to eat and drink as much as possible before they get back on the ship. Zihuatanejo seems to have a lot of good restaurants, but these don’t do the business they might do if the cruise ships stayed in port for the night. However, there are a large number of gift shops and thatched stalls that sell classier stuff than we have seen in many of the smaller Mexican towns. We don’t have room on the boat to collect stuff, nor the inclination to do so now that we have stripped down our living situation to just what we need. If we were eventually returning to a large house, I can see that we would be tempted to pick up some very beautiful artifacts to fill up horizontal surfaces there.
We came to Zihuatanejo to get information on the trip to the Marquesas across the Pacific, since this is a location than many cruisers use as the departure location for the “Pacific Puddle Jump.” But we also timed our arrival to coincide with Zihuatanejo’s Sail-Fest, a multi-day affair put on by whatever cruisers are in the area to raise money for an Indian school that cruisers have been sponsoring for several years. Apparently the indigenous population is made up of Indians who speak their own language and very little Spanish. This school was designed to teach Indian children to speak Spanish; so they can get into the Spanish-language schools, where they can get a decent education. This is one way that the cruiser community has supported the town, and it appears to be a very successful, multi-year project. Last year I believe the cruiser community raised almost $50,000 and that was matched by some commercial organizations. I will talk about some of what we have been doing as part of Sail-Fest in my next blog, but I am a bit behind on my writing with all that has been going on here; so I’ll get this out soon. I assure you there will be no solicitations for donations, but you will get to hear how we did in the cruisers’ sailboat race. More later . . .
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
