Today we left the relative comfort of the Paradise Village Marina and started on our trip north, stopping overnight at a nearby anchorage, called La Cruz de Huanacaxtle (pronounced whana-cost’-lee, with the accent on the second syllable), where we have anchored before. This is just an hour or so north of Paradise Village, but explaining why we set out and only made one hour of headway before anchoring for the night has everything to do with winds, tides, and scarcity of full-service fuel facilities. In San Diego nearly every marina has a fuel dock; so it is relatively easy to grab some fuel before sailing out for the day. Not so in Mexico.
Before setting out we needed to get about 40 gallons of fuel (half of what we can carry) from the only fuel dock in Banderas Bay, which is located in Marina Vallarta (where the cruise ships anchor) about an hour south of the Paradise Village Marina. That means going out into the bay and re-entering another marina an hour south of us. When we fueled up on our last visit several months ago, we were advised to come in later in the morning, after the pangas and fishing boats had gotten fuel for the day. When we got there at 11AM that time, the tide was going out and we were forced to counteract the tide pulling us out as we waited nearly an hour in the channel for our turn. At that time we even had wave runners (little one-person high speed craft) jump in front of us for a quick fill up.
For this fueling effort we decided to go in at slack high tide (no movement of the water into or out of the marina), which happened to be 12:42PM today. It would also bring us into the fueling dock after everyone else had been fueled for the day, and, if we had to wait, we wouldn’t be bucking the tide as we waited. This time frame is a little late to start a voyage, since the closest anchorage outside of Banderas Bay is Chacala, nearly eight hours north of us. Everything went off as planned. We got to the fueling dock in very calm water and had no one ahead of us. We were fueled up in 15 minutes (about $2.50 per gallon) and out at about 1PM with a gentle 10-knot breeze, allowing us to sail the two hours north to La Cruz. If we could have done all this at 8AM, we would have been well on our way today, but that’s the story of cruising and you can’t fight mother nature or the commercial boating interests in Mexico.
Tomorrow we will set out early in the morning to get around Punta Mita (the northwest point of Banderas Bay) and on up to Chacala for a day or two. It’s nice to know that we really don’t have anything driving us except our own convenience. Of course there is also the specter of hurricane season driving us north, a season that starts in June and ends in October. Normally hurricanes don’t go much further north than Puerto Vallarta, and we will be well up into the Sea of Cortez by the end of May, so we shouldn’t have much to worry about. Nevertheless, we will be hanging near a couple of hurricane holes this summer just in case a storm does make it further north than normal. In these “holes” we would strip the sails off the boat, remove anything else that could be blown off, set out several anchors and/or tie off to trees on shore, and then get off the boat and pray for a quick dissolution of the storm.
Since my last blog, we made a supply run to Costco and loaded down a taxicab with meat, cheese, tomato sauce, cooking oil, flour, toilet paper, paper towels, Ziploc bags – generally large volume items that we would be using for a few months. Our boat was in a slip right next to the parking lot and the gate and ramp that led down to the dock. So it was very convenient to take a cab right to the boat and unload it there. The only problem was the lack of boxes or bags at Costco, which caused us to unload the cart with individual bottles and cans directly into the cab and then unload everything on the ground when we arrived at the marina. Passersby could see what we would be eating for the next several months as we hurriedly made multiple trips from the parking lot to the boat, but the proximity of the boat helped a lot.
Our boat ended up spending about a month and a half at the marina, while we were there for about three weeks of that time. It was a bit of an effort to leave the safety and security of the marina to head out again. I’m afraid we had gotten accustomed to modern grocery stores nearby, a fresh water swimming pool every afternoon to cool down, running water at the dock that was drinkable, all the electricity we could want, and even a cable TV hookup. This last convenience got us back into watching the news, Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, Dr. Phil, Judge Judy, and Seinfeld reruns. We also had the opportunity to see the mainstream media cover the primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, until we realized that they would keep on talking about anything and everything 24/7. How can the media stand to hear themselves talk about the same things over and over? We certainly couldn’t.
Now we will get back into living on the hook with dinghy trips into small towns for whatever vegetables and necessary food items we can find at the local shops (tiendas). Already we are glad to be away from the flotsam and jetsam of dead fish, floating coconuts, scum, and other debris that seem to inhabit marina waters, flowing in and out on the tide, but never seeming to really flow out to sea. Our anchorage here has clean-looking water all around, but who knows how clean it is. At least the smells are better here, we have more privacy, and there are no dock lights shining into the portholes and hatches all night.
At the moment it is 8PM, still plenty of light outside, and we are both stripped down to shorts to stay cool. We put up a wind-scoop to direct air down through our forward hatch, and we have been using our cabin fans most of the day to keep the air circulating. We can’t use an air conditioner while anchored because it would take too much electricity from our batteries to keep it running, but we get a lot more wind in the anchorage than we ever could in a protected marina environment. Even in marinas cruisers make judicious use of air conditioners, because the cost of the electricity is passed on to the boat owner.
The hardest part about leaving was saying good-by to some new cruiser friends, John and Kathy of Batu, who will be spending the next six months at Paradise Village. Puerto Vallarta is considered a hurricane hole, but it has never been visited by one as yet; so there is little to worry about from that standpoint. John and Kathy have been cruising for quite a while and are interested in staying put for awhile. We’ll miss playing Mexican Train with them, because Kathy insists on losing big every time. The flip side of this coin is that we will be meeting a lot of cruising friends – who departed for the Sea of Cortez ahead of us – as we journey up to Mazatlan, La Paz, and points north. Whenever we enter a new anchorage, we will no doubt see a boat anchored there with cruisers we have met before.
We will be out of internet contact for the next week or so. We will get back in touch when we get to Mazatlan, and hopefully we will have some stories to tell. One of the activities I want to do is use my kayak to surf Matanchen Bay, which is supposed to have some of the longest surf breaks in Mexico. I plan to tie the kayak to my wrist; so it will stay with me, if I fall overboard. I still remember surfing in Hawaii in the 70’s on a long board before they had tethers to keep the board near at hand. I can’t count the number of times I got tossed off my board during my learning phase, only to have to swim all the way into the beach to get it. I can’t believe I didn’t invent the concept of the tethered surfboard back in those days, but some of the boards were so large that the first thing you wanted to do when you fell off was to get away from the board to keep it from striking you.
More later . . .
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