Pictures

We are anchored in Huatulco, and plan to move to the marina either todaya or tomorrow so we can do some inland travel.  But in the meantime, here is some of what we have been looking at and experiencing.

This is a sunset on the way to Manzanillo

This is what the moon looks like at night while sailing

This is where we anchored in Manzanillo

Booby on Board

Sleeping Booby

More to come!

  

Missing Post

Here is a post that never got published while I was underway.  It was from January 31, and now that I am back in regular internet, I see that the Januaary 30 post was published twice, and this one not at all.  When I am underway posting over the SSB radio, I can't see what has been published as I can't log on and look at it.  Anyway, I haven't figured out how to delete the extra 30th post, but here is the one that was missed.

We left Zihuatanejo on the 29th at about noon.  It is now the 31st at 9 am.  You do the math, I am too tired after my night watch.

 

It has been a real mixed bag, so far.  Nothing bad has happened, just those periods of no wind where it is all I can do to keep the boat moving forward in the right direction.  That usually begins at sunset and hits its most problematic apex on my watch.  Mike did warn me that this particular watch was a "dynamic watch."  So far it is.  The good part is that I am getting better at reading the instruments and determining how to use all this data I am provided with electronically.  And being directionally challenged does not help.  If I am using a road map and driving south, I turn the map upside down so my finger traces the line just as the car is driving.  I can't do that with the GPS display.  I sometimes get confused about which direction I need to turn (left or right)in order to head in the direction I want to go.  I suppose that makes no sense at all, and I really can't explain it.  No wonder Mike gets irritated with me!

 

Last night (I guess early this morning to be precise) Mike and I saw the most fabulous dolphin laser light show ever.  There were at least ten of them, and they were frolicking in the bioluminesence going all around and under the boat.  They were slapping their tales on the water, and making all kinds of racket.  It really seemed like they were playing with the biolum on purpose, not just swimming through it.  We watched them for at least 10 to 15 minutes. 

 

This morning, before it was really light out, I saw a lone booby flying all around the boat in circles.  He came so close to where I was sitting in the cockpit that when he came up behind me, the rustle of his wings was so loud it startled me.  He flew around and around the boat for about 15 minutes at least, and then finally came to rest perched on the bow pulpit.  We don't usually allow boobies to stay on the boat because they make a horrible mess in a short period of time.  But I let him stay awhile, in part because it looked like any mess would more likely go overboard than on deck.  I was surprised he actually landed where he did because boobies don't perch - they have duck feet, and they land on water or land or on a flat rock surface, not where they have to curl their feet around something narrow.  But this one did a good job.  He didn't fly away until I got in close taking pictures of him.

Well, that will have to do it for today.  I suspect we have several more days before we get there - wind and weather permitting!

"If you smile at me I will understand for that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language."  Stephen Stills (I think)

Really Not Much At All

It has been a couple of days (I think so anyway -the days sort of blends together out here) and things have simply been quiet and peaceful. We went for a beach cookout day before yesterday with our friends and had a great time - we had paella cooked over a fire. Mike and our friend dug a hole in the sand and lined it with stones. Then we made a fire in it and cooked the paella over the fire on a grill. It's funny - we spend so much time living off of beaches yet aren't really on them that much. Its hard to explain. We often swim off the boat, and when we go to shore we hike and stuff like that to get exercise. Or we dive, merely using the shore to store our stuff while we are in the water. Then we go back to the boat for beers. Or to a nearby palapa restaurant for beers and seafood. But we spend way less time actually hanging out on the beach then I did in San Diego. Anyway, the cookout was wonderful - delicious food, great company, and a really special locale.

We have also been doing the inevitable boat chores - buckets of laundry, cleaning out through hulls so the toilet continues to function properly, and keeping things spruced up generally. Without a frig, we have managed to be here at anchor for days now without running the engine to charge the batteries. And we are not overly conservative about our power usage - we use this computer, we watch movies, keep the place well-lighted, use our fans, and other things. It is really amazing.

The plan as of today is to spend the rest of the week here, and then check into the marina nearby on Monday. Then we want to take a trip inland into the state of Oaxaca while the boat is safely marina-ed (my newest new word). I have a request into the marina for rates and availability information. We'll see what happens.

So that is really all I can think of for today - not one of the more exciting posts, unfortunately. But even out here, things can at times be mundane and routine, which is periodically sort of comforting. Our plan for today and the next couple of days is for the boat to have a bow to stern cleaning inside and out. I guess you could call it spring cleaning. Cheers!

"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned . . . A man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company." Samuel Johnson

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Rock and Roll

That is what we did here last night and what we have done all day today. I have discovered that the Pacific Ocean anchorages are not, for the most part, as calm as most of the anchorages in the Sea of Cortez. This one has been pretty rolly in general, but not a problem. It is still not really a problem, except for making it uncomfortable to sleep. Mike says it is because there is a Tehuantepecker blowing south of us, affecting the swell in the anchorage.

I should tell you about those. "Tehuantepeckers" are winds that funnel across the skinny part of the southeastern part of Mexico, from the Caribbean to the Pacific, across the Bay of Tehuantepec. We are going to have to watch the weather very carefully when we get ready to leave for El Salvador, because we do not want to sail through one. The winds are very strong and the seas get big and hard to deal with. It is supposed to be a very uncomfortable sail at best if you plan it wrong, and it could be dangerous at worst. You have to sail close to shore, watching the depth, in order to avoid the strong fetch causing big short s waves. We will be crossing at the end of the gale season.

But for right now, we continue to enjoy ourselves here in Bahia San Augustin, aka Puerto Sacrificio. Yesterday we had to go into the little town that is close by here, because we had no cash money and there is no ATM here. So we made the acquaintance of Burro Kiko, who is the go-to guy for whatever you need in this area. He owns one of the seafood palapa cantina/restaurants (they call those restaurants "mariscos"down here) that serves wonderful food. So we went over there in the dinghy, and struck a deal for a ride the 28 kilometers into La Crucecita. It was a long ride, because a good portion was over a dirt road with lots of "topes", or rather dramatic speed bumps. We went to the bank, and then just drove around looking things over. It is a really neat, pretty, clean little town with just about all the necessities. On the way home, Burro Kiko took us to a little roadside stand where we bought a bag of ripe mangoes, and later on he cut a nice hand of bananas from a stalk in his restaurant and gave it to us to take back to the boat. Then after we returned back, we discovered that Burro Kiko (real name Roberto) had satellite TV at his little palapa restaurant, and also informed us we were welcome to stay and watch the Superbowl! We had an incredible grilled seafood platter, and drank beer and watched the game. We were joined by the waiter Juan Carlos and Burro Kiko, and were treated to shots of mescal on the house. It was a really wonderful day. We found out the peacocks in Mexico are called "pavo real" which translates as "royal turkey." We also saw some wild looking birds we have yet to identify.

Anyway, today we just kicked back here on the boat, did a few chores, and watched some movies. I didn't sleep that well because of all the rolling, so I was pretty tired anyway. I am not expecting things to be much better tonight, but I hope they do not get worse.

We don't have any kind of internet access here in this anchorage, but eventually we will check into the marina here, to get ready for the push to El Salvador. We have been reviewing all the information we have about Central America, and El Salvador in particular. I am really getting excited about it. We may stop in Puerto Chiapas after crossing the Bay of Tehuantepec, prior to leaving Mexico, but we aren't sure about that yet. As soon as I get internet access, I will be posting pictures. So - that is all for today. Time to watch another movie.

"Oh who can tell, save he whose heart hath tried,
And danced in triumph o'er the waters wide,
The exulting sense - the pulse's maddening play,
That thrills the wanderer of that trackless way" Lord Byron

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Huatulco!

We arrived here yesterday after sailing for five days. I was really glad to see the harbor, and the last three miles seemed pretty long. We are anchored in a beautiful little bay, with rocky sides and rocky out croppings along the shoreline. There are several wonderful looking beaches sandwiched in between the rocks. I will post some pictures as soon as I have regular internet connection.

The little bay where we are anchored is part of a larger system called Bahias De Huatulco. This particular one has two names - Bahia San Augustin (which I like and feel comfortable with) and Bahia Sacrificio (which I do not like and do not feel comfortable with). One of the little beaches is lined with palapa restaurants. We ate at one of them last night - it was delicious. I had shrimp cooked in garlic and butter.

Today we made water and discovered we used very little over the course of the voyage. Both of us showered (TMI, I know) and both of us had plenty of water to drink. We did wash dishes, and I even did a tiny load of laundry. So we were really pleased with the results. It bodes well for long passages across oceans to have easy access to that much water with such good quality. I really need to write a nice letter to the guy who makes and sells them so he could have a testimonial to show people.

Mike and a friend of ours looked the frig over and tinkered with it for several hours today, and finally pronounced it dead. We cleaned it out too - I had been sort of dreading dealing with it, but it wasn't that big of a deal after all. It smelled bad when I opened it - not that there was anything rotten in it, I had been keeping things pretty well cleaned out, but it had been closed up, and just wasn't very fresh. So we emptied it, cleaned it out, rinsed it with bleach, and now it is clean and fresh and ready for a new life as an icebox. It was a good excuse to get rid of all the condiments that were almost empty, things we bought and tried but didn't really like but never threw away, stuff like that. Now we can start over again. It is liberating in a strange sort of way. But then I always did like throwing everything out and starting over.

I think while underway we managed to join a very exclusive club - the number of people who have seen sea turtles mate in the wild. It was pretty amazing. I simply can[t believe how many turtles we saw this trip, and how many jellies as well. Not to mention the sea snake.

Mike and I felt pretty good about this trip, for all my whining about going so slowly. When we checked all the hours and did all the math, we discovered the trip took 123 hours and we used the engine for 12.3 of them! The symmetry of that blew me away, but then I love stuff like that. So we only motored 10% of the time. Mike is really invested in sailing as much as possible, and I am not opposed to it, but there are times I am going to want to get where we are going and might insist on some motoring. He has promised not to be at all stingy about using the motor to cross the infamous Gulf of Tehuanapec.

We will be in this area here for about a month, and at some point will likely go into the marina to get ready for the push to El Salvador. We also want to take a trip to the city of Oaxaca, and maybe some other land exploration as well. Plus we need to see about getting our mail, and things can be easily DHL'd care of the marina.

Tomorrow we are heading into town for cash and a few provisions. Our friends are here, and perhaps they will tag along with us. We found a girl selling jewelry made from the pearl-type things produced by abalone. They were absolutely beautiful and I want to buy some, so we need cash - having forgot to get any before we left Zihuatanejo. Bad mistake, we can't do that again, even after we leave Mexico. You never know when you will end up somewhere with no ATM or one that is hard to get to. From now on we will not be so careless!

"The sea is as near as we come to another world." Anne Stevenson

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The Show Goes On

(Feb 2, 10:25 am central time)

Today I saw my first sea snake ever. It was kind of a greyish dark green with a bright yellow stripe, about three feet long. It had a really small head and mouth, and was shaped a bit differently than your average land snake. We saw it because we were both looking over the side of the boat watching jellyfish and regular fish swimming around. There are these small striped fish (they look like what one would have in an aquarium) that are always swimming around the boat, and all of a sudden they took off in a big group right up to the surface and started milling around something, and that something turned out to be the snake. I ran and got the camera - I think we got pictures of it. We tried.

Between the snake and all these jellies, I am not going on swim call out here. The jellies have to be seen to be believed. There are literally hundreds of different kinds of them, all different sizes, shapes, colors, consistencies, you name it. Some of them are incredibly beautiful, with delicate shaping and neon colors that flash like LED lights, visible even in the daytime. There are great big ones and little tiny ones that look like bits of plant matter until you look close. We have vowed to get a microscope kit and a specimen net, and handling gloves.

Of course I have to admit I would not get to see all these incredible creatures if we were going faster. At 1.5 or 2 knots per hour, you can sit on the side of the boat and just watch the creatures go by. We are learning who is out at what time of day, who seems to be bold and curious and who is shy, who squabbles with other species and who does not, and all sorts of things. It is like being at the zoo or at an aquarium all the time. If we motored along, we would miss all this.

Right now we are motoring - we do motor about an hour each day to charge the batteries. I insist that Mike put it into gear and get somewhere since we have to do it anyway. We wait until there is a period of no wind (inevitable) and then take advantage of what would be just drifting along to make some progress. I hate the noise as much as he does. But I am putting it to good use right now - using the computer to write this, as well as charging the phone (which we can only use in port or close to a cell tower when we are offshore) and my Kindle. Finally, the engine performs better if it is used regularly.

Yesterday in the afternoon we came across an entire herd (for lack of a better term) of sea turtles. We usually see them on occasion, but yesterday it was one after another, two and three at a time. Many of them had boobies riding on their backs, and almost all of them had bird poop on their back. (Because we were drifting along almost becalmed, we were able to get up close and see all this.) I figure maybe they are all headed to shore for mating and egg laying. I have never seen so many! And some of them were huge!

We are just over 100 miles from Huatulco, so I think we will make it some time tomorrow. Famous last words! It all depends on the wind of course - I am settled in for the duration and will not fight it. Last night I found meat that had gone bad - I think we are just about out of anything that was frozen. All that is left are a few vegetables that will be eaten today and tomorrow, and some lunchmeat and sausage that is probably indestructable and shouldn't be eaten anyway because to survive that long is not natural and frankly a little scary. I have a lot of soy chorizo - that will stay good for a long time. The beer is getting warm - I will be surprised if our one daily underway beer that we have in the late afternoon is still cold. We will see how long the eggs last.

So that is it for today from somewhere off the southern coast of Mexico. It is strange to think of how far east we are because I always think of Mexico as being a western place. We are really far south, too, possibly further south than I have ever been before.

"You can sail for one day, can't you? That's all it is - one day after another." Harry Pidgeon, three time single handed circumnavigator

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Wildlife of the Briny Deep

It is February 1, 2012. This is the best month of the year for so many reasons: 29 days sometimes, Valentine's Day, President's Day, Black History Month . . . all sorts of exciting things. Oh! I forgot! It is also my birthday month AND my anniversary month.

It is only 11:49 am. but so far it has been an eventful day. Yesterday at about 8 pm (after I had gone to bed) Mike heard a splash behind him and looked around. He saw a booby that had crashed landed in the water just to the stern of where he was sitting in the cockpit. Then the bird struggled to fly, circled the boat a couple of times, and landed on the deck. Mike decided to let him (or her, it is hard to tell with boobies because there is no visible difference [to me at least] between males and females) stay there. It was dark and the bird seemed to be having trouble. When I got up at 2 am for my watch, Mike told me we had a guest, and pointed him out. It was too dark for me to see anything other than a booby-sized blob on the deck.

I had dolphins checking in with me all through the night - coming up and making their presence known the way they do - although I could only hear and not see them as there was no real bioluminescence last night. I kept an eye on the booby shaped blob, and as the sky began to lighten (about 6:15 am or so, I could sort of make him out. I got a better view after sunrise. He was standing nicely on the deck, sleeping with his head under his wing.

Later he woke up and began to preen his feathers (he pretty much continued to preen off and on for the rest of the time he was on the boat). He had a chocolate brown back and a white stomach. His feet were a lovely light green. (There are blue footed boobies too.) When he spread his chocolate brown, wings, there were white highlights visible. His head was a mixture of brown and white feather, which looked sort of beige from a distance. His head was that same color mixture, only lighter. Finally, he had a fringe of white around his tiny face with its big round black eyes. His beak, which took up most of his face, was sort of blue with the lines the same color as his feet on it. It was like a cross between a bill and a beak, really.

Because he was there and getting better and better looking - his feathers were plushier looking, he seemed to be getting peppier, he moved around more, we decided he was just resting, not sick or dying, and made the decision to allow him to stay until he was ready to leave. No problem except due to his choice of locations on the deck, we couldn't rig and use the asymmetrical spinnaker, so we couldn't make particularly good time. But so what else is new with us? We have been poking along with a few time periods here and there with really decent winds.

I am spending a lot of time thinking about why I get so frustrated with how long it takes us to get places. We are about the only people we know who are so loathe to use the engine. I have no idea if people laugh at us or admire us for our determination to sail everywhere. I suspect there is some of both. Intellectually I have no problem with it. I like it out here. I don't get bored. I have no set schedule. Nonetheless, it annoys me when we average less than 2 knots per hour. I need to figure this out so I can get over it. It isn't a matter of saving fuel here, because we could easily motor the while way if we wanted to. But Tahiti will be a long sail, there will be periods when we will be becalmed possibly for days, and we will need to ration our fuel on a trip that will last a month or so.

The other wildlife adventures today were as follows: periodic clots of weird looking jellyfish, several sea turtles, a booby riding on a turtle's back (I have a picture), and a large pod of dolphins who cavorted at the bow of the boat for almost 20 minutes. I guess this is a big reason why I don't get bored out here.

"I made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self." Joshua Slocum, "Sailing Alone Around the World"

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