Back to Baja

This time the weather forecasts were "golden." Geary's sonrisanet forecast, Stan's southern crossing forecast and gribs containing data from NOAA's Global Forecast System (GFS) all indicated that Thursday, March 22, would be the optimal day to depart Mazatlan for Baja. Only a little more than two weeks ago, similar rosy forecasts had induced us to round Cabo Corrientes in weather conditions that turned nasty, resulting in a head injury for Sally. This time it was nearly calm all the way from Mazatlan to La Paz, never more than ten knots of wind for 52 hours. We had a beautiful sail for 10 hours, but the rest of the time we motored. With light winds right on the nose most of the way, motoring saved us an extra day on the ocean.

Actually, not all forecasts were golden. Dulce Maestra, a "buddy boat" which accompanied us most of the time we were under sail, employs a commercial weather routing service which told her to expect winds from the SSW when she crossed 108 degrees of longitude. When Jan of Dulce Maestra told me this, I was surprised since it did not agree with the other forecasts. So I was very interested in seeing whether the commercial service could provide a forecast the free services were incapable of. As it turned out, we saw no SSW wind at the 108th meridian or beyond.

We arrived in La Paz in the early afternoon of Saturday, March 24, 2012. We stopped at the excellent fuel dock at Costa Baja to refuel and to register for a slip at the Costa Baja marina. In the evening we enjoyed a truly exceptional meal at the Azul Marino, only a few hundred paces from the boat. This may well be La Paz's best restaurant.

Boogie Boards, Whales, Moonsets, Crossings and Tossings, El Presidente, and Plastic Sheeting

We left Barra de Navidad on Sunday, March 4, with a new piece of equipment on board – a boogie board. (Essential for a swimmer who likes to play in the waves.) Fairly easy to stow, weight-wise, since it's nearly as light as air. We headed again to the beautiful bay at Tenacatita, expecting more boat-to-shore swims and Mexican Train activity. Arriving in the early afternoon after a short sail, we dropped anchor and only then noticed a sort of red tinge in large expanses of the water. We shortly realized this was an algal bloom, or red tide as it's commonly known. A dinghy approached almost as soon as our anchor was down, and we were greeted by Dick of the cutter “Full and By.” More neighbors from the northwest – Dick and his wife Anne are from White Rock, BC. We discussed swimming to shore the next day, if the algae problem was looking better. But on Monday, the algae was at first worse – no expanses of red sea, just a lot of muddy looking plant life suspended in the water. Mid morning, Anne paddled over in a kayak and, pointing to a small beach away from the main span, told us the water was clear there and if we wanted to swim that would be a good place. We rowed over in the dinghy and I rolled off and swam around while Alan paddled back and forth for a while. Then we went to the main beach and walked its length, ending up at the resort hotel at the far end. Returning to the boat and the hot sun shower, we had dinner and prepared to depart early the next morning for what we anticipated would be a 24 hour voyage to La Cruz.

On Tuesday, March 6, we pulled up the anchor and headed north. For about 16 hours we sailed, with two and three sails up. In the middle of the night the wind died, so we lowered all but the main and turned on the engine. We were approaching Cabo Corrientes, and we expected to just motor around it. A few hours later the wind from the north increased dramatically and the waves became high and choppy. NS was being tossed about and Aletta, our tiller pilot, was getting quite a workout. Every time she attempted to make an adjustment to course she made a loud groaning noise. Alan decided he should reef the main and put up the staysail, so we could sail and give the tiller pilot a rest. With Alan at the mast dealing with halyards and reefing lines, I was in the cockpit steering with one hand and trying to manipulate the main sheet with the other. When a wave hit hard, causing NS to heel suddenly, I was tossed violently across the cockpit and slammed into the other side. Alan said seeing me catapult across the cockpit was “probably the most frightening thing I have ever witnessed. First she was was literally flying across the boat. I thought for an instant that she would go overboard. Then she crashed into the deck and suddenly blood was gushing everywhere.”

Alan gave me a bunch of paper towels to staunch the flow of blood and then he gave me all the ice cubes in the freezer. I lay in a daze trying to stop the bleeding, hoping the pain would subside, and wishing the boat would stop bucking around, but of course the seas and wind did not stop immediately just because I was injured. We were 46 nautical miles from La Cruz .

Alan returned to the job of reefing the main and putting up the staysail. He then set Rangval (our Monitor wind-vane self-steering) on an offshore course. Once that was accomplished, we did not have to concern ourselves quite so much with the operation of the boat and could concentrate on first-aid.

Luckily it calmed down later in the afternoon and we were able to start enjoying the trip again. The second morning we watched an almost-full moon set in the west as the sun rose in the east. Magical! On Thursday morning, March 8, we were really glad to pull into La Cruz, our 24 hour journey having turned into 48.

I visited Dr. Pepper (seriously, his last name is Pimienta), who cleaned my head wound, applied more butterfly bandages (the window of opportunity for stitching had long since closed) and prescribed antibiotics and ibuprofen. He also recommended an x-ray to see if my skull had been fractured, which I resisted at first and then reconsidered when we ran into him on the street and he made me feel guilty about it. Upon having my head examined, I was declared fracture-free. I will have an interesting forehead scar and an interesting tale to go along with it.

We stayed in La Cruz nearly a week. During that time all of Banderas Bay in general, and La Cruz in particular, was the site of a huge sailing regatta, with boat races of all different sizes of craft from sailboards up to 70-some footers. We mingled with sailing teams from all over the world (lots of Californians), heard loud rock bands until all hours of the night, experienced fireworks 50 feet from NS, watched and listened to the drone of helicopters coming and going all day and night, and even saw El Presidente, Felipe Calderon himself, as he cruised by in a luxury power yacht to survey some of the advances his country is making in the tourism industry.

Leaving La Cruz Wednesday, March 14, we headed for Chacala, 46 nautical miles north. As we did on our last visit, we put out bow and stern anchors to keep NS aligned with the incoming swell, in addition to the flopper-stopper. On Thursday I swam to the beach and Alan rowed. I played around in the surf with the boogie board, as Alan had lunch and a beer in a palapa restaurant, to the background of continuous oom-pah music. Tubas are really big in Mexico, pun intended.

Thursday, after Alan spent considerable time and effort dismantling the flopper-stopper, retrieving the stern anchor and deflating the dinghy, we finally started out on our next overnight (hopefully only one night this time) voyage – to Mazatlan. The wind was right on our nose, so we motored. After 20 hours underway, we discovered that the reason our speed had been slowed by a knot and a half for the preceding four hours was that we were dragging a fishnet. Alan cut it off with a kelp-cutting hook knife on a telescoping handle and then we proceeded. Mid-morning we passed some fishermen who chased us in their panga to point out that we had caught their long line. They were able to extricate it from the rudder. About an hour later, the engine suddenly slowed way down and our speed was reduced to about 2 .5 knots, even though the RPMs were still at the usual 1700. Black smoke was billowing from the exhaust.

We shut down the engine and I jumped in the water with snorkel gear to have a look. Wrapped tightly around and around the propeller shaft was a bunch of plastic sheeting. Steadying myself with a couple of lines, I tried to keep myself under the boat enough to saw off the plastic with a serrated knife. After many attempts, sawing a little each time, sometimes thwarted by the swell as the waves swept over the snorkel and filled it with water, other times popping out of the water like a cork, I finally ended up riding the rudder like a horse, bracing my foot between the propeller and the shaft and basically doing whatever else it took to keep sawing away at all the ragged black plastic. I was chilled but elated when the last of the plastic finally floated free. The boat resumed its normal speed, with an engine that was no longer straining.

We were about 32 miles from Mazatlan at that point and now several hours behind schedule, but were still determined to arrive before dark. We pulled into the marina shortly after the sun went down. Luckily we had been there twice before and most of the channel markers (most being the operative word) are lighted, so we made it safely to the dock.

The upside of this trip was that we saw lots of whales. Off our port beam we saw two humpbacks breaching repeatedly for several minutes. Later, not 40 feet from the cockpit, there was a snorting, puffing sound, and two whales rolled halfway up out of the water. And then somewhat later a group of whales frolicked and played and flapped their tails a few hundred feet astern of NS.

The first thing we did in Mazatlan was to have pizza and wine for dinner, a sort of "deliverance" celebration as Alan called it. And although I've long abhorred the plastic waste that is cluttering up the planet, I now have a personal vendetta against it.

Chacala, La Cruz, Tenacatita, Barra

After an early start from San Blas on Saturday, February 18, we spent the night anchored off the beautiful beach at Chacala. We set both bow and stern anchors in order to keep the boat pointed in the direction of the incoming swell, thus minimizing her tendency to roll. We did not go ashore. In the morning, we continued on to Banderas Bay, arriving at Marina La Cruz just before sunset on Sunday, the 19th. As we walked up into town to find some dinner, we were disappointed to discover that Claudia's little restaurant has closed. We learned that she and her family have moved to Guadalajara. We ended up eating in a new restaurant in a new building on the small traffic circle on Langosta avenue, called Tortuga Bay. Very good seafood and wine, but they could improve their meals a lot by including vegetables.

In all, we spent six nights at La Cruz, which we really like.  The marina is excellent. They seem to have solved the wifi Internet problems they had last year. The town with its many restaurants and its music scene is as vibrant as ever. There is a fine path along the seawall, perfect for jogging. There is a beach nearby where Sally went swimming in the surf several times. We ate dinner and danced at Philo's and had drinks and danced at Anna Banana's.

We took the bus into Puerto Vallarta and walked the malecon and had fine meal at the Vitea Waterfront Bistro. I love the statues along that seawall for their whimsy. They share that with those on the La Paz malecon. Those in Mazatlan tend to be a bit too heroic and pretentious.

On Saturday, February 25, we left La Cruz mid-afternoon and headed for Cabo Corrientes, rounding that cape in the early morning hours, when the seas tend to be the calmest. We continued on throughout the day, arriving at Bahia de Tenacatita just before sunset on the 26th. There is an active cruiser community in that beautiful bay and every morning on the VHF cruisers' net there is some activity or other proposed. That particular Monday, a round of Mexican Train, a card game, was on the agenda, scheduled for the palapa restaurant on the beach. At 2 PM, Darrel from SV Over-Heated came by in his dinghy, ferried Sally over to his boat where she jumped in the water and was joined by Rita from Over-Heated and Patricia from Paloma for a swim to shore. Meanwhile, I completed a few chores, pumped up our inflatable dinghy, and rowed in to observe Sally and the other Mexican Train players in action. When I rowed back to the boat, I accompanied Sally, not because there was the slightest possibility that she could not swim the distance, but to reduce the risk of her being run over by a panga.

Last year, our dinghy was swamped when we tried to motor to shore in the Tenacatita surf, requiring a couple of hours of work to get the salt water out of the outboard. To avoid a recurrence, I left the motor off of the dinghy this time, carried my possessions in a water-proof bag and was prepared to go into the water if necessary. As it turned out, I only got my back a little wet on the way out.

After a second night in Tenacatita, we left for Barra, arriving in the Marina Puerto Navidad in the late afternoon of February 28. We got a slip right next to our friends from last year, Ron and Pam on Shadowfax, and just a few slips away from Neil and Kristen on OutRider. We immediately took the water taxi into Barra to meet Marie and Steve from Saben, whom we had met in San Blas and who were heading for points south in the morning. We had a great meal at Los Arcos. Just like last year, we watched the tail end of the Carnival parade from that restaurant. The next evening we had dinner with Ron and Pam at Fortinos, a restaurant on the lagoon in Colimilla, a short walk from the marina. They told us about their trip last spring to Panama on friend's boat. Last night we ate with Neil at Poco Loco, a pizza place in Barra, and learned about his trip to Japan after the tsunami last year, as part of the relief effort.

We head north tomorrow morning and plan to spend the night anchored in Tenacatita again.

Our current location is N 19 11.736, W 104 40.975.