We are now spending some time once again at Tenacatita on our way up to Puerto Vallarta, where we are scheduled to go into the Paradise Village Marina on April 1st for a month. We have about 120 nautical miles (that’s about 136 statute miles) to get to Puerto Vallarta with three small bays/anchorages on the way up to stop in and rest. Tenacatita is only about 10 miles west and then north of Barra de Navidad, and it usually takes about two hours to get here. When we had traversed the distance going south a couple of weeks ago, the wind had been just off our nose and we had sailed for about 3 hours on that trip to get to Barra. In this case the wind was directly on our nose as we left Barra and then followed our nose around to the north as we rounded the point into Tenacatita Bay. The wind was blowing about 25 knots, the seas had about 4-6’ swells, and there were white caps all around. Our normal speed of 5-6 knots was slowed to 3-4 knots and the boat was bucking up and down over the swells all the way with the wind blowing the spray all over the boat. We managed to travel the 10 miles in about 3 hours, arriving with a salt-covered boat and a renewed respect for the wind and waves.
I thought I’d explain a bit about why we use nautical miles instead of statute miles while cruising. The easiest explanation is that the dials and gauges display nautical miles, but nowadays there is usually an opportunity to change them to statute miles with either software or a switch. The most important reason is that a nautical mile happens to be the distance of one minute of latitude (60 nautical miles in one degree of latitude); so nearly all (if not all) charts are displayed in nautical miles. When measuring distance on a chart, one only needs to use a set of dividers (the compass with two points) putting a point on one location and the other point on the other location, and then laying the distance between the two points of the dividers along the local longitude line on the chart to measure off the distance in minutes of latitude. This sounds more complex than it really is, but just understand that in the future I will continue to mean “nautical miles” when this blog refers to “miles.”
We passed up staying in Barra through St. Patrick’s Day despite the fact that St. Patrick is the patron saint of Melaque, a nearby town, and it is rumored that the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations there rival anything you might find in New York or San Francisco. Our reason for leaving early was caused mainly by the crowded nature of the lagoon and the presence of brown effluent floating by the boat in the morning during the last few days we were there. It appeared that some of the cruisers were dumping their waste directly into the lagoon rather than saving it in a holding tank and dumping it out in the ocean periodically. It seemed that some of the boats never left the lagoon to do their dumping outside, and it was getting pretty ripe from our perspective. On Monday a diver came by to clean the bottom of the boat and earned every penny of the $50 it cost to have him do it. I wouldn’t have gone into that water for anything, although most of the day it was clear of the brown floating scum we were seeing in the morning.
It’s really a shame when a cruiser (or anyone for that matter) fouls the water that others are using. In the Barra Lagoon it appeared to me that some of the cruisers were reluctant to leave their location in the anchorage to do their dumping for fear they wouldn’t have a spot to return to. In an earlier blog I mentioned that we had anchored our dinghy in our location as we went out in the sea to dump the holding tank, and found it still there when we returned. In all fairness I have to say that some of the dumping problem could have been caused by the local town and its release of waste, and we were seeing it before the tide cleaned it out of the lagoon. At any rate, we are looking forward to cruising in the Sea of Cortez this spring and summer, where it is said there are absolutely clear anchorages with no other boats around most of the time.
In one of the big winds that sprang up in the Barra Lagoon we noticed that our wind gauge was reading zero and our anemometer at the top of the mast was not spinning. That had happened before in San Diego before we started out, and Sheilagh had gone up the mast to remove it and then gone back up to replace it when we had cleaned it out. She even recorded the event in one of her early blogs, chastising me for not knowing how to work the camera to capture her image at the top of the mast. In this case a fellow cruiser offered to help, and he and I managed to get Sheilagh almost to the top, but not as high up as she had been before. Sheilagh froze at the top in complete terror at the prospect of climbing further up without a safety line – not something we would have allowed her to do. This time we were using a block and tackle setup that we had purchased from our rigger in San Diego, but it meant that she could not get as high as she needed to be to do the job without abandoning the safety of the bosun’s chair (which is a no-no). The friend who was helping us offered to bring over his climbing harness the following day, which could give us the extra safety we needed for this job.
On Monday the friend came back with his climbing harness, but Sheilagh was indicating in no uncertain terms that it was my turn to go up. You have to be aware that when Sheilagh and I were dating during our college days we went to a favorite hiking place of mine along the Spokane River (yes, there was a day when Sheilagh would actually hike for a bit – definitely before marriage). At one point we came to a rather high bluff over the river where Sheilagh immediately walked out to the edge to look over. At the time she looked shocked to see me crawl to within a couple of feet of the edge on my hands and knees, and then decide that the view was not worth the apparent danger. I begged her to keep away from the edge in case it collapsed and I might have to go to her rescue. I have a serious fear of heights, and here I was being asked to climb to the top of our 58’ mast, and actually accomplish something at the top while clinging to the mast with hands, feet, knees, and elbows.
Just as I was climbing into the harness and saying my final prayers, a dinghy arrived with Cathy and John from Batu, our sister ship that we described in an earlier blog. We had mentioned that we would be doing this on Monday and they were there to help. John said something about preferring to go up the mast rather than expend the energy to hoist someone else up, and I was out of the harness in a flash. John is a big guy but I was never happier to haul on the block and tackle to get him to the top to retrieve the wind instrument, and then to haul him back up with the instrument after Sheilagh and I cleaned, lubed and put it back together. So now we are adding a climbing harness to our list of essential tools for the boat, and I am still hoping that the boat will capsize with the mast in the water when it is my turn to go up – or “out” should this be the case. The anemometer and the wind gauge have been working fine since.
As we were sailing over to Tenacatita in the wet and windy conditions I described earlier, Sheilagh noticed leaking under the forward hatch caused by a loose hinge. At the time we could only put a towel under the hatch to collect the leaking water, but I took it apart yesterday to find that two rivets had failed in the hinge mechanism. I had no rivets and no rivet gun, nor did I have any machine screws of the size that might be used to repair it temporarily. That meant we might have to live with a leaky hatch until we got to Puerto Vallarta, a journey that would continue to be fairly wet and wild. I put out a call to the fleet at Tenacatita asking if anyone had a rivet gun and rivets, and the boat next door, Decade Dance (say it quickly as one word) with Dave and Betty Lou aboard responded. So the morning was spent removing and replacing the forward hatch cover, discovering in the process that our silicone caulk had dried up in one tube and was on the point of drying up in the other. We now have a rivet set and a more silicone caulk added to our equipment list for future purchase. This time we should look for smaller tubes of caulk that we can throw away when we’re finished with a job and have a new one for the next job.
Yesterday we dinghied into the beach at Tenacatita to participate in the duck races that were being held that day. Since we had seen no ducks in the area – just sea birds – we were curious as to how this event would be handled. We had only heard an announcement over the morning net that this event would be taking place at 2PM with betting to open at 1:30PM. The surf was a bit high, but we made it through to the beach on the back of a wave without getting wet at all, although we observed the dinghy ahead of us unloading passengers in the water behind the surf break before attempting to come in. We walked over to the crowd on the beach and saw some thirty rubber ducks lined up, each with a number written on it in black marker. We were handed a typewritten sheet with the list of ducks and a bit of history on each of the ducks, including its wins in the past, its background as a racing duck, and other pertinent information to enable us to pick a possible winner. It was surprising to us that a cruising couple on a sailboat could find the room to keep a stable of racing ducks on their boat, but apparently they are devoted to the sport.
I picked the duck with the aviator hat and goggles, while Sheilagh picked one that was holding an inner-tube around its middle. It cost us 10 pesos apiece to participate, and it was a great way to meet some of the other cruisers who were new to us. At 2PM the two cruisers running the show put all the ducks in a plastic bucket, launched their dinghy back out through the surf, dumped the bucket just beyond the surf line, and dinghied back into shore. Several of us opened beers to await the outcome of the race and eventually noted that the ducks were being carried out to sea, rather than into shore. The organizers of the race hadn’t paid attention to the tides and the tide was definitely going out. Once again the starting team took a dinghy back out through the surf, collected all the ducks back into the bucket, and then dumped them inside the surf line. This time the ducks were tumbled shoreward with each succeeding wave and I noticed that none of the ducks really rode the waves well. The ducks were declared over the line when the surf deposited them onshore and went back out without moving them backward.
The winner turned out to be one of the largest ducks in the group. Apparently the larger size allowed it to stay higher in the water and therefore tumbled better by the waves. For the future we will have a much better chance of winning this event with this new information about racing ducks. The upshot of this experience was that we all must have come a long way along the path of relaxation, if a rubber duck race could keep 20-30 adults and children occupied for a couple of hours. Now we have to start looking for the right kind of rubber duck to allow us to dominate any future competitions. We're not competitive or anything!
More Later . . .
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