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.
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