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 . . .