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 . . .
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