Always a good move to start the blog with the picture of a gorgeous woman - Sheilagh in La CruzI finished up my last blog describing two nights of music that Sheilagh and I had enjoyed: “open mike night” at Philo’s Restaurant on Thursday and the flamenco guitarists, Latcho and Andrea, on Friday. Saturday we continued our music fiesta with the group called Tatawari, four young men playing flamenco-like music with two lead guitars, a bass guitar and a drummer. This group exhibited a tremendous amount of energy and pure enjoyment of the music they were playing – music that was highly intricate and extremely quick. Although their songs were quite long, they kept the audience enthralled. Those who chose to eat dinner during the performance carried on very little conversation at the table.
We had heard of another restaurant, Ana Bananas, which held an “open mike night” on Sunday afternoon; so we joined other cruisers in attendance there, too. We had never been to the restaurant before and were surprised to see that all the seating was outdoors, with just the kitchen and bar housed in the building. This restaurant owner was a U.S. citizen who had married the Mexican woman, Ana, and was able to purchase the restaurant in her name. Otherwise he would have had to form a Mexican corporation in order to buy property here. Imagine if we denied property ownership in the U.S. to anyone who wasn’t a citizen unless they formed a U.S. corporation. Even the legal Mexican aliens would be out-of-luck.
We had attended the performance with no thought of eating out that night, but gradually the air was filled with the scent of roasting pork ribs, and Sheilagh began drooling down the front of her top. I was smart enough to order a slab, knowing that it was a way to win points and stop her slobbering. Then I just had to point out where she was dribbling barbecue sauce down her front. I guess I should have taken her out more often; so she could practice her manners. The music moved from folk to rock and roll, gaining in volume through the afternoon. There is probably a different “open mike night” every day of the week in the vicinity of La Cruz or the next town over, Bucerias.
We were commenting on the fact that we had been in isolated anchorages for the past several weeks, saving money by having no restaurants nearby, and suddenly we have eaten out several times and attended four music venues in less than a week. That’s what cruising is about, I guess. You learn to take advantage of opportunities when they occur, since there is no telling when other opportunities will arise. We probably should have done more of that when we were engaged in making a living and raising a family.
I still remember passing up attending the Rose Bowl when our oldest daughter, Melissa, was on the dance team for UCLA, which represented the Pac-10 one year. Then we passed up going some two years later, when our daughter, Stephanie, was attending the University of Oregon, which represented the Pac-10 that year. I’m not sure when I thought the opportunity would roll around again. Certainly not with Megan’s University of Alaska, nor Kimberley’s San Diego State, neither of which plays in the Pac-10. Maybe Sheilagh and I should just spend the money on scalper tickets and attend the Rose Bowl just for the sake of attending it.
Monday we cleaned the green, sticky fringe of seaweed growing around our boat at water level and encountered the first of several very cloudy afternoons. Although it seemed as if we could be rained on at any time, it was really just a phenomenon called the “Pineapple Express,” which is a flow of warm moist air from the south west (from the direction of Hawaii) that develops into a deep and dark overcast sky. We partially closed our hatches, fearing rain, but got no raindrops all afternoon.
The next day we went into town early to get groceries and what turned out to be a very close haircut (for me) and then pulled up our anchor to motor over to Punta de Mita, as the stepping off point for heading north to San Blas and ultimately to Mazatlan. It’s a very short 2-hour trip, but it set us up to get around the point early the next morning. Since points of land dividing two bodies of water are notorious for dubious weather when the wind has had a chance to develop, we try to pass most of the big points of land early in the morning.
We dropped anchor and read all afternoon as the sky again became dark and the air a bit cool. As the sky darkened, Sheilagh reminded me that this would be ideal weather to be dressed warmly in our condo with a fire in the fireplace and a good book to curl up with. She had the book, a warm place to curl up, and the right kind of weather, but not having a fireplace and being subject to wind and waves on a boat spoiled her feeling of security.
The next day we were up early and around the point fairly quickly. Our GPS in the cockpit had failed earlier in the trip, and our radar suddenly stopped showing contacts on our way up to La Cruz; so we had some tricky sailing to do around the point. There are two plotted sea mounts that stick up to just three feet below the water on the way around the point, and a third that is known to be 2.25 miles from the point in a southwesterly direction. When we passed it coming south we used our radar to stay just 1.5 miles off the point so as to miss all three sea mounts. This time we had no radar so we used the GPS to stay south of the three problem areas, and waited until we had crossed a line of longitude that would keep us clear on the west. We had no problems whatever in avoiding the hazards.
Just as we settled down for the northwesterly trip, I noted a black shape rise from the water almost directly in front of us. It was the back of a fin-back whale just 20’ to our right. I yelled for Sheilagh and we scrambled to get the camera out, turned on, and focused in time to get a shot of the whale. We must have gone just over his tail as he submerged directly beside our boat. Thankfully he didn’t raise his tail out of the water as he went down or our boat might have been lifted a few feet in the air. Naturally we missed the shot, but kept the camera ready for the rest of the day. Someday we’ll have the camera ready at the start of a trip to make sure we capture sights like that.
The trip to Matanchén Bay was a good 10 hours ahead, and it was unlikely that we would get there before dark. So we contacted our friends, Jim and Susan on “Windward Bound,” who told us they were anchored near a small island, Isla de Peña (Lat: 21°03.16’ N / Long: 105°16.38’ W), in Guayabitos Cove, just about 4 hours away from us on the way to San Blas. We decided to take the slight detour and found a lovely bay and the resort town of Guayabitos, which is seldom visited by cruisers. The town and beach were crowded with Canadian vacationers, who had apparently discovered it some time ago and haven’t shared the secret with us United States citizens.
A hotel entrance in Guayabitos with a weapon around the corner - to keep order?Jim and Susan of “Windward Bound” invited us and the only other boat in the anchorage to a cocktail hour on their boat; so we were able to meet Frank and Stephanie of “Endless Summer,” who came down this year on the Baja Ha Ha with dozens of other first-time cruisers, as we did last year. Like us they had retired just a short time before starting the trip, but unlike us, they were newly married at about the same time. He was a confirmed, never-married bachelor in his fifties, and she already had grown children; so it is an adventure in more ways than one for this cruising couple.
Isla de Pena - a small island that protects against the northwest wind and swells with a small beach that is covered at high tideThe small island which shielded us from the northwest swells sits a ways off the beach and is similar to Isla Isabela in that it is coated white with bird guano on the western side, has a bit of an odor, and had birds circling above it nearly all the time. In a blog from a year ago I mentioned how bad the smell was at Isla Isabela – so bad in
fact that everything I tried to eat smelled like bird droppings to me and I couldn’t keep anything down. This, thankfully, was not so bad, but we did experience a lot of white and gray bird droppings suddenly coating the deck of our boat. Thank goodness for the bimini, which protected us in the cockpit.The birds wheeling above the anchorage, depositing whitewash on the boat
We went into Guayabitos the next day with Jim and Susan, who showed us where to land on the beach – just in front of a mini-brewery, The Backstreet Brewery & Restaurant, where we introduced ourselves and tried some of the products. I had the Amber, the other Jim had the Pale Ale, and the two ladies tried the Hefewiezen. The room reserved for the making of beer had full stainless steel equipment, although on a much smaller scale than one sees in a Gordon Biersch mini-brewery. The restaurant had been recommended by another cruiser, who was friends with the owner, and the owner immediately showed us the operation and refused to take payment for the beer we drank.
A vegetable stand along the street and a Toucan in captivity - they are not native to MexicoWe wandered around the town, finding another restaurant at the other end of the beach when lunch time rolled around. After a very inexpensive lunch ($10 including drinks for two), we did some sight-seeing, noting the usual Mexican paraphernalia available in resort towns along the coast – all of it apparently manufactured inland and shipped to the various resort towns. We got the impression that some of the people who sell merchandise on the beach actually purchase their products at wholesale prices, and it is up to them to recoup their costs and profits by selling their inventory. Nothing like true capitalism keeping the sellers plying the beaches all day!
The "Blue-Footed Booby" himself - preparing to clean the boat while staying warmWhile at anchor near Isla la Peña, I took the opportunity to fully clean the bottom of our boat in preparation for the last 24-hour sail to Mazatlan, where we will put the boat in a marina for a couple of months. I found mostly green fuzz all over the bottom with some hard-shelled barnacles that had managed to get a foothold (or whatever it is that joins barnacles to other objects). Since I had been getting somewhat chilled in the past after spending an hour-and-a-half under water, I decided to try my wet suit that I had purchased some 10 year ago, when I was a bit thinner. I could actually get it on and zipped up, and I am furnishing a picture to prove it.
On the long way back from the beach we ran out of fuel in our dinghy, while Jim and Susan had already returned to their boat in a much faster dinghy. As we sat there contemplating the full effort to row back to the boat, where we had a backup gas can stored, we opened the fuel tank and noted that there was still some gas in the tank, but not enough to be sucked up by the take-up hose. We found a tilted position for the tank, where gas could be kept under the take-up hose, and we were able to get the engine started again. Then it was up to Sheilagh to keep the tank tipped at just the right angle until we could make it back to the boat, which we did.
Sheilagh thinks I look like a blue-footed booby with the fins on, and I can’t exactly deny the resemblance. I also had to add an extra 10 pounds to the weight belt I wear to offset the buoyancy of the wet suit itself. Normally I wear a 40 lb. weight belt to help keep my normally buoyant body submerged. As I was peeling undergrowth from the bottom I attracted a school of fish, each about a foot-and-a-half long. They darted all around me to capture the best tidbits as soon as I scraped them off the boat. I also noticed about three yellow-tail tuna joining the crowd; so I had Sheilagh hand me my Hawaiian Sling fish spear when I was done cleaning the bottom.
I managed to get one of the three prongs into one of the regular fish, and one prong into one of the yellow-tails, but they flipped off the spear immediately. If I had managed to get all three points into a fish, it would have had a difficult time getting off the spear, because the points separate a bit, keeping the fish on. As it was, my compressor was running out of air and the fish noted the lack of fish food coming off the bottom of the boat; so hunter and hunted bid each other goodbye.
Today we left the anchorage at Isla de Peña, and motor-sailed north to Matanchén Bay, which is very near San Blas. The tide was low when we got near San Blas, which is not the time to enter the estuary next to the town. Therefore we anchored in the large bay for the afternoon to wait until high tide on Saturday. More later . . .
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