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 . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment