Happy Tax Day,
By the time you get this, tax day will have come and gone. "When the taxman came to my door and asked me: 'Steve, why haven't you paid taxes for the last three years?' I had two simple words for him: 'I forgot!'" (Steve Martin) Actually, speaking of the tax man, go figure this one -- I had no income last year other than interest and probably a loss on my house rental and when my taxes were done, it turns out Uncle Sam is sending me a refund?! Pretty darned impressive, getting paid for cruising around the tropics by the good ole US of A.
We are sitting here in Puerto Madero waiting for a package of boat parts to arrive. Now that we've left the Mexican Cruising Highway between Mazatlan and Zihuatanejo, we are finding fewer cruising boats and anchorages to ourselves or with just a handful of other boats! Many of the boats heading Northbound are finishing circumnavigations or coming up from the Canal, so it's a fresh new crowd. There is also a contingent heading Southbound. We are listening in (since we can't transmit) on the Panama Connection cruisers ham radio net, so we can keep up with the boats which we've met along the way.
After leaving Barra de Navidad, we ventured to a multitude of anchorages. We first arrived at Bahia Santiago, which was where we had a wonderful reunion of four SIYC boats: Perpetua, Le Zarder, Sea Tern, and Kestrel. We held a couple of impromptu club meetings on Perpetua and it was really a treat to finally catch up with Perpetua in an anchorage down here in sunny Mexico. We found a nice little anchorage (not in Charlie's Charts) just as you enter the Manzanillo Bay called Ensenada Carrizal -- the only place we've found on the mainland that is deserted, meaning no palapas and the water is clear! It's a fair weather anchorage as it would become uncomfortable if the swells were up or the wind came straight into the bay.
We then ventured down to Isla Grande and Zihuatanejo. Isla Grande was quite developed and the night we were there a big swell came up and it was quite a miserable night at anchor. We sailed on down to Z-town the next day and crossed paths with our friends Dick and Nancy on Askari. Jay mooned them in greeting, which if you know Dick, you'd know it was an appropriate greeting! After picking up a local fisherman's sombrero out of the water and nearly hitting Mariah in the process, we dropped the hook in Z-town. Zihuatanejo is a pretty little town, but was a disappointment to us as it's built up to be this grand cruiser's hangout. We did get to touch base with several boats we knew from the Sea of Cortez, so that was a treat. Rick's Bar is the new hangout -- he's got good live music on the weekend and he reminds me very much of my old boss, Tom Rookard, at the sailing school in Portland.
From Zihuatanejo, we did a two night passage down to Acapulco. The first day out we were flying the spinnaker and had a swarm of bees decide: "Hey lookit that pretty flower out there on the ocean, lets move there." They swarmed the spinnaker. Hardening up onto a beam reach we tried to blow them away -- didn't work. We then doused the spinnaker with the spinnaker sock, and that got those bees pretty darned excited (we'd shut up the cabin at this point, so they wouldn't swarm into the cabin). Upon losing their ocean flower they decided that there might be a little home for them at the mast head. We spent the next couple hours slapping the spinnaker halyard against the mast trying to discourage those little buggers from thinking the masthead would be a nice home. By the following day there were no signs of bees, so we must've been successful!
We were planning on stopping in at Papanoa, but the winds made it a lee-shore anchorage and the place you are suppose to be able to tuck into behind one of the breakwaters has shoaled in -- behind the other breakwater our anchor drug when we were trying to set it, so we continued on. The wind was favorable, we thought why not?! When we got into Acapulco in the morning, the swell had risen to about 10+ feet, which was probably the biggest swell we'd seen since the Southern Oregon coast. But the swells were long and they weren't threatening like in Oregon. In any case, we were glad to arrive in Acapulco and we had a great short tack up the bay to the anchorage. It was reminiscent of river sailing! We found that by reefing the jib a bit on the furler, the jib tacks around the staysail stay much easier -- we've had problems in the past with approaching anchorages under sail and reverting to motor because of our inability to short tack with full jib and with the staysail stay up and interfering. We now have a solution.
We did major provisioning in Acapulco, and it became the "San Diego" of Mexico for us. We were hoping Jay's father would fly in for a visit, but that didn't materialize. I guess we'll just have to go to Chile to visit him! We took a road trip up to Mexico City ("Day Efay" as they say here for the initials DF 'Distrito Federal' aka Mexico DF).
We went to visit Jesus and Mati, a wonderful couple we'd met up in Copper Canyon, in Ixtapalapa near Mexico City. They opened their home to us and treated us like royalty for our brief 3 day visit. They were wonderful and hosted us to a day long visit of the Teotihuacan pyramids and ruins. It's an ancient city outside of Mexico DF and was more populated with 170,000 during its heyday than Rome during the Roman empire. As an architectural feat it was quite impressive especially considering the basic tools which were used at the time. Visiting ancient pyramids was one of the things which I really wanted to do before leaving Mexico and we are thankful to have had the opportunity to visit this impressive site, which was a day-long excursion. The next day we went down to the Zocalo and visited the Belles Artes among other places, which is their performing arts building. And what an impressive building it is with its art deco interior. It is quite representative of it's time, built in the early 1900s.
Most of the larger buildings in DF are sinking and several of them you cannot visit because they are unstable or tilting at such an angle as to be dangerous. At the end of the second day we were bushed from two full days of walking around. We got to meet most of Jesus and Mati's family and the visit really put our Spanish to good use -- Jay understanding the majority of it and me catching snippets here and there. We were sad to say good-bye to Jesus and Mati. We invited them to come visit us in Oregon when we return, as we want to reciprocate their generosity. As they say in Mexico, "Mi Casa es Su Casa". It's true!
We finally got out of Acapulco, which by the way is a really nice city, especially for a tourist city. It is very large and lays in a bowl of mountains surrounding a sizable bay. Acapulco was a pleasant surprise for us, and it really does have just about everything. They even have sailboat races once a week! Do not miss the cliff divers if you ever visit this city.
From Acapulco we did another two night passage to Puerto Angel. Puerto Angel is just a wee anchorage and is a bit surgy, but it was a very pleasant stopover in a beautiful setting. The locals were very friendly as were the Navy who boarded us immediately upon arrival -- including a sniffer dog which was an adorable black lab. Our first boarding in Mexico presented us with very friendly and humorous young men carrying all kinds of scary automatic weapons. They graciously gave us the 20 questions and had the dog go through the lockers. Upon opening the shoe locker the dog turned up her nose and that was that.
From Puerto Angel it was an easy jaunt to Huatulco, where I ended up having fever for about 3 days and so resigned myself to the cabin and weatherfax duty. We studied the faxes as they came through, because the next jaunt was the 48 hour crossing of the dreaded Golfo de Tehuantepec, where gales are a common occurrence. We got a short weather window of about 24 hours, so we went for it. Knowing that we would be past the worst part within 12 hours and if the gale came up in 24, we'd have a nice beam to broad reach the rest of the way. In any case, it ended up being a mostly motor trip (which blew our sailing-to-motoring ratio) and the Gulf was flat calm when we passed by the eye of the wind vortex. We had a great 2 knot push when we left Huatulco until we reached the top of the Gulf, then had only a brief period of counter current before getting another favorable push the rest of the way down to Puerto Madero. One down, one to go (Gulf of Papagayo in Northern Costa Rica).
So we are back where we started, sitting here waiting for the package. Puerto Madero is a love/hate kind of place -- the people are so friendly, there are only a few cruisers which pass through, and the kids keep you entertained on the weekends swimming out to the boat. But there is also a feeling of discontent about some of the people and this is the first place where we've had pangaderos actually drive full throttle purposefully right by the boat and laugh. But the kids and friendly people more than make up for the few surly ones. Tapachula, the town about 20 miles away (about 11 pesos one way) is quite big and just about anything you would ever need can be had there.
We are still unsure what stops we will make between here and Costa Rica. We are really looking forward to getting there, barn bound as they say -- can't get there fast enough. We had our first encounter with afternoon convection (thunderstorms) yesterday, which brought about 25-30 knot winds, but no rain which was a disappointment as Kestrel really needs a bath, not to mention us too! The afternoon convection puts a sense of urgency to get our long passages to Costa Rica under our belt as we can just do day trips once there.
We trust this newsletter finds you healthy, happy and of course not working too hard. We hate for our friends to put too much effort into work when we're out here having fun! :-) We wish you could be out here having fun with us! Keep the e-mails coming, we love hearing from you!
Wishing you little taxes and BIG returns,
Leslie & Jay
PS: We have sold two more articles to SAIL magazine (4 in total!). I sold an article on anchoring and Jay sold a blurb on young cruisers in the Cruising Notes section. We think two photos are also going to be purchased. I guess SAIL can now be called our employer! Thank you Lin Pardey!