March 1 – Barra Lagoon – Jim’s Blog #28

We are now one of 50+ boats in the Barra Lagoon, which means it’s getting very crowded in here. Thank goodness the tides are moderate during the quarter moon, because a lot of boats are anchored in fairly shallow water and we are very close to one another. At extremely low tides some of these boats are going to be touching the bottom. In fact Sheilagh just pointed out a sailboat in a shallow part of the anchorage which has just tipped over from the vertical by about 15° because it is sitting on the bottom. It is a strange sport to sit here and wait for boats to go aground. We have already cautioned a number of boats entering the channel who were about to run aground on a hidden bar – either over the radio or while heading into town in our dinghy. We are always surprised that these boats haven’t slowed down to just a couple of knots; so their momentum won’t run them onto hidden bars so far that they can’t be backed off easily.

The swells outside the lagoon are extremely high and breaking very loudly on the beaches around here. At night we wake up occasionally swearing that we hear thunder, but it is only the waves breaking on the beaches. Inside the lagoon we are protected from these swells. We also have a dock-like wall to which we can tie our dinghies when we need to go into town, so we don’t have to handle landing and taking off from a beach. We understand that the higher swells in Tenacatita (just north of us) have confined some cruisers to their boats, since the waves breaking on the beach are too much to handle with a dinghy – and there are no docks there.

We finally got our mail from early February and found several tax forms among the junk mail, along with a notice from the IRS that we are being audited for 2005. That pretty well sealed the fact that we need to return home in April and pick up some documentation prior to filing our taxes for the year, especially since the IRS told us we needed to reply 30 days after the date of the notice (which we got 20 days later). We’ll take care of it, but it did bring up the concern of how we handle the same type of notice if we are in the South Pacific. We may need to keep 7 years of tax papers with us on the boat or find a good spot to keep them. There is probably someone who has already started a business of holding cruisers’ financial papers while they are gone; we just need to find the service.

We also received our repaired autopilot after paying more customs on the components we had sent out to be repaired. Apparently we were supposed to have found some official in Mexico and gotten a stamped approval that the serial-numbered items we were sending back to be fixed were actually in use on our boat and therefore not subject to customs. No one can tell us just who is authorized to give us this approval – an approval that would be accepted by customs upon the return of the items. There are agents who would charge us 5% of the value of the items to do this for us, but we have heard cruiser stories that customs does not necessarily honor these approvals. I am now convinced that there is more bureaucracy in Mexico than in the United States. If one out of six persons in the U.S. is being paid by a government agency, then the ratio must be one out of three in this country, and the other two must be fishermen or shop owners from our limited perspective.

I have re-installed the autopilot and done a check of it at anchor, but we are waiting until tomorrow to test it out in the bay. I’m almost afraid to test it because I don’t want to find out that it doesn’t work. So far we have spent more than the cost of an entirely new autopilot to get this one repaired and calibrated, if we count in the shipping and customs duties. This is all part of the cruiser experience that I am documenting in this blog – just so you don’t think that everything is completely wonderful. Naturally we choose to put up with these out-of-country difficulties to have the mild tropical climate far from the cold of the U.S. this winter.

At the moment Sheilagh is even questioning the climate benefit against the problems of always being concerned about the availability of water, the pumping out of our holding tank, the lack of ease of walking a block to a convenience store for something we are missing, the possibility of dragging our anchor, or (worse yet) the dragging of someone else’s anchor that puts them in a position to run into us. Most of the cruisers are leaving our keys in the ignition and our windlass powered (the windlass raises the anchor); so that others can rescue our boat if we are in town while our boat is threatening, or being threatened by, another boat in the anchorage.

We met Jake and Sharon from the boat, Jake out of Seattle, Washington, and had appetizers and drinks on their boat the other evening. They have a Hunter 45 with a width of 13’10” (about a foot wider than ours and five feet longer), and it seems very roomy compared with our boat. The interesting fact is that they have been living on a boat of some sort during the past 20 years or so. Both were professionals who had to have a professional wardrobe while they were living aboard – Jake in financial accounting and Sharon as a teacher. They kept these wardrobes on the boat, alternating a winter and summer wardrobe with a storage location on shore. Jake mentioned that the need for a suit had declined over the past several years, so he had been down to one formal suit and wore business casual most of the time, which was my experience as well. I have heard that some companies are going back to suits and ties; so I am very thankful that I could get out of the rat race when I did.

Sheilagh and I took a “primo” bus into Manzanillo from Barra de Navidad yesterday. A “Primo” bus has soft, comfortable seats, air-conditioning, curtains on the windows, a good suspension system, and very few stops – exactly the opposite of the local buses. It cost us about $4.50 apiece for an hour-long, one-way trip to the local Wal-Mart and Soriana stores (Soriana is the local equivalent of Wal-Mart). Previously we had sailed our boat down to Manzanillo – a four-hour trip at a minimum – to ship out our autopilot. The one-hour bus ride down (and one-hour back) was much easier than the boat ride for a simple shopping trip. Our manually-operated blender had broken down, denying us that essential Mexican drink – a blended Margarita. We decided it was time for an electric blender because the electricity we saved by hand-cranking the manual blender to break down the ice cubes was not worth the effort.

We bought a good blender at Wal-Mart, but found it was missing a knob when we got all the way back to the boat. A metal washer took the place of the knob, since it would not have been worth the journey back. We have noticed that it is difficult to find a boxed item in the small appliance section of either Soriana or Wal-Mart that hasn’t been opened previously. Apparently a lot of cannibalizing of parts goes on in these sections of the stores that we need to be aware of for the future. Next time we’ll have to open a few boxes ourselves and make sure we have all the parts before we leave the store. We also bought a few DVD’s to augment what we already have, and made sure to get our cheeseburger and fries fix at the Burger King next to the Soriana store.

Since we had gotten off the “Primo” bus at Soriana’s, we had to take a local bus back to Santiago (Mexico not Chile) to get to a “Primo” bus station. We got off a bit early, when the local bus took a turn away from our intended destination, but we finally got directions from a local citizen and got some exercise walking a few blocks to the correct bus station. As I look back on my years owning a car, I don’t believe I could ever have given someone directions to either a local bus stop or a “primo” bus station. It reminds me of how much of the support infrastructure we are not familiar with depending on our lifestyles. No wonder our legislators in Washington (and in Sacramento) are out of touch with the rest of the country, if we ourselves are out of touch with what goes on around us every day.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but the bus drivers in Mexico (local or “primo”) decorate the space around their seats much as cubicle dwellers in the business world decorate their cubicles. There is an abundance of Our Lady of Guadalupe pictures that are no doubt intended to help provide divine protection for the drivers from traffic accidents. The gear shift lever arising from the floor is often decorated with a leather sheath and tassels with the name of the driver’s wife or girlfriend worked into the leather.

The local bus driver on this trip had a woven tapestry of Our Lady of Guadalupe above the window combined with his and his wife’s name embroidered on it, possibly a wedding gift or a warning from the wife for other women to keep their hands off. The “primo” bus driver on the way out had a crucifix and a graphic of the head of Jesus with a crown of thorns, possibly a statement of how he viewed his job. And the returning “primo” bus driver had a white, fur-edged mirror with three stuffed frogs of different types hanging from it and from the ceiling. My thought was that the last driver didn’t feel the need for divine intervention, or he was worshipping a god with which I was not familiar.

More later . . .