Heading North on Che Bella (April 2)

Dan and I left Barra on Sunday April 2, planning to head north to Chamela 40 miles up the coast. However, the engine was performing a little oddly, so we stopped in Tenacatita Bay (only 10 miles north) to troubleshoot it. Dan snorkeled down to scrape banricles off the prop. After nearly an hour of diving and scraping, he was exhausted, but the proplem seemed to be fixed. But he didn't feel like going swimming when a couple of dolphins appeared in the anchorage. I dove in alone. Although the dolphins had been pretty close to the boat at one point, by the time I jumped in they were a ways off... so I can't quite say I was swimming with dolphins. I had seen dolphins in the bay before, and hope to see them again and have another chance to swim with them on some return trip to La Manzanilla on the eastern shore of this bay.

We made another couple of stops on our way north up the coast, including at San Blas, which we had skipped on the way down. We arrived on Palm Sunday, beginning of weeklong party of Semana Santa. There were ladies selling palm fronds in from of the church.

The tourist guides are fond of pointing out that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a famous poem called the Bells of San Blas, about the bells in the old church. The church that inspired the poem is crumbling outside town, but they put a placard on the newer church that still looks passably old and has the requisite bells to make people feel better about taking pictures of it and its belfry. I won't repeat the poem here, though it isn't bad. Of course I'm biased by the fact that it talks about boats sailing south from Mazatlan in the first stanza. Check it out. Dan and I spent the afternoon walking around the town, which I found to be quite nice; not so many tourists, not too big, pleasant atmosphere.

The most surprising thing we encountered in town was a leashed monkey hanging out at the fuel dock. Dan and I had been joking that it would be nice to have a boat monkey to do some of the more monotonous chores... we were both surprised to see one here. It did not seem to be as helpful as the monkies we had imagined. In fact, I'm a bit ashamed to admit, the monkey scared me.

The beach where we left the dinghy was lined with palapa restaraurants and vacationing Mexicans. Many families from inland cities come to the coast for Easter week, so it was fairly busy. We got back to the shore from town after dinner and found that the tide had come up further than we expected. The place we had left the dinghy was now underwater, and we were afraid that it had floated away. Thankfully, someone had pulled the dinghy up clear of the water -- which was actually a bit into the restaraunt. Further evidence that Mexico is full of genuinely nice people.
Covered parking -- you can't beat that!

From San Blas, we had an overnight passage up to Mazatlan. Unexpectedly, the marina put us in a slip between two of Dan's friends' boats. Jellybean, another boat that Dan was friendly with, with former Sonoma County residents Marlene and Roy aboard, came in a couple days later with their rudder and prop fouled by a fishing contraption involving 10 foot long palm fronds and lots of polypropolene line. They took the slip two down from us. Dan hadn't done any entertaining on the boat yet, and had been kind of intending to have some people over for a while. With them all so close by it seemed like a perfect opportunity. There's a saying about the number of people you can fit on a sailboat, it drinks 8, eats 4 and sleeps 2. We managed to fit 8 of us in the cockpit for dinner -- a bit cozy, but the well seasoned cruisers didn't seem to mind.

I had met one of the couples, that had the sailboat Endeavor next to us, while in Zihuatenejo. Nice folks. Canadian. They had planned to sail from Zihau to the Marquesas (a three to four week trip across the Pacific), and I had heard them on the radio on March 20, while I was down on Sumatra (with Jerry, grrrrr), say they had left with a couple other boats heading for the Marquesas. I was surprised to hear they were back in Mexico. Apparently after a few days of miserable conditions they decided they weren't having fun, and turned around. Later, one of the other boats (White Swan, with another couple I had met down here) had emailed and said that they had had one good day of the three weeks they had been sailing. Ugh. But they had it better than the lady whose engine stopped working. Ouch. Then her mast buckled. She had to jerry rig a sail to make it to the islands. Oh yeah, and somehow she had lost her dinghy in the process, and was using the inflatable floor of a friend's dinghy as a raft to get from the boat to the island. I had heard about her before she left... she was thinking of going alone, but was looking for crew. Fortunately she had found one. Fortunately it wasn't me.

At this point I was content for my big out-of-sight-of-land adventure to be crossing the Sea of Cortez, 200 miles from Mazatlan to the tip of the Baja Peninsula. Within about 20 miles, the boat is out of sight of land and the whole trip takes a day and a half to two days, depending on where excatly you stop on the Baja side. I had done this in the reverse direction with Floyd and Dirk-the-Dutch-crew on Malulani, and we had had an easy crossing of this stretch of water known for turning up high winds and choppy seas unexpectedly. But the weather was supposed to be calm for the crossing to Baja that Dan and I were planning to start on the morning of Friday April 14. (Note to superstitious mariners: this does not count as a Friday departure, it was merely the continuation of a voyage, which was started on Sunday April 2. Or so I like to tell myself.) There wasn't much wind, and we motored for a day. The sky had gotten cloudy during Dan's 3 am watch, and I curled up in the fleece blanket looking out at the indistinct line of the grey clouds on the flat, grey water during my "sunrise" watch. It reminded me of Alaska, though not nearly as cold. It reminded Dan of the Jim Carey movie "The Turman Show." In those early hours of Saturday, the GPS indicated that if we continued to make 6 knots, that we would cover the remaining 64 miles to Baja in nearly 13 hours, arriving around 8 pm. Looking out at the calm, grey morning. (Composition inspired by Amber Padilla)

Our ETA was bumped up later that day as the wind picked up to 15, then 20, then 25 knots. At the left is Dan holding on while checking the wind speed witih the anemometer. We were screaming along at 7+ knots with a reef in the main. When we put a second reef in, it slowed us to a more respectable heel angle and a decent 6.5 knots. The quickened pace got us into the anchorage at Los Muertos by 6 pm. Yeah!