It’s only mid March but in this area cruisers start to look for weather windows so they can start the trek North. The dominant wind direction here from the fall to the spring is from the Northwest. Since going north up the west coast of Mexico really means going northwest, i.e. right into the wind, cruisers wait for periods of southerly winds. The summer winds are usually from the South. The forecast for last Tuesday thru Friday morning was for light winds with a southerly component.
So we took off Tuesday morning with a short 20-mile sail the first day, then a 55-mile trip the second day to Mantanchen Bay. Next a 140-mile overnight leg Thursday morning to Friday morning. We traveled with two other sailboats and met Basta!, the retired OBGYN who was next to us in Paradise Village, on the last long leg. We had a comfortable trip except for perhaps 8 hours when we pounded in to headwinds. We have pounded worse so it wasn’t bad. The new autopilot lived up to our expectations. The highlight was the night in Mantanchen Bay, which was beautiful. The jungle-covered mountains in places come right down to the ocean, ending in large cliffs. I will post pictures of the blazing red sun setting behind some palm trees. The next night we had a full moon until an hour before sunrise when clouds obscured the moon. We could see the glow from Mazatlan by then and a large cruise ship that was covered with bright white lights crossed in front of us as it entered the commercial harbor. I had an opportunity to do some neat navigation work to avoid the islands and other navigation hazards around Mazatlan.
The entrance to the Mazatlan marinas is considered a little tricky and at times it is closed due to sea conditions and dredging. I was concerned but we arrived at dawn with the wind calm, just 30 minutes before high tide and the seas almost flat. A helpful cruiser inside the marina gave us the current conditions in the entrance channel via radio. There is often a dredge working on the channel that closes much or the entire channel. The three days before Easter is huge holiday in Mexico. Inland Mexicans head for the beach and the costal towns are mobbed. The locals that live on the coast head inland to avoid the crowds. A long way of saying the dredge was not working on Good Friday and we had an easy entrance into the marina. As I write this Easter Sunday morning the harbor entrance is closed because of the sea conditions.
As is the custom, several cruisers took our lines as we docked. After introductions I told them I owed my bride a nice dinner because she handled her night watch like a pro. Could they recommend a restaurant for tonight? No they said, take her to dinner next week, the town is mobbed, you don’t really want to go into town.
It takes several hours to clean the boat up after a passage, wash the salt off the decks and stainless steel, rig her for dock power, cover the sails and do the required paper work to check into a new port and marina. Then its nap time, we don’t really sleep well the first night at sea.
If the cook stands watches she can’t cook so it’s PB&J, soup and munchies during night passages. We both wanted a nice meal before catching up on our sleep.
So about 3 PM we went up to the main road, we are several miles north of town, to catch a bus. As luck would have it a pickup truck with benches in the truck bed drove past. I waved it down and Rhea and I road into town in the back of a pick up truck. We shared the truck bed with two huge speakers, which the driver thankfully shut off.
Downtown looked like Ft. Lauderdale during spring break. Wall to wall young adults in swimsuits drinking as they walked the street. We found a nice restaurant and had a good meal. After a little shopping we took an open air taxi (pulmonias), they look like a golf cart or a VW bug with the roof cut off and a couple of rows of bench seats on the back, to the marina. We were in bed by 7:30 and didn’t wake up until dawn.
Saturday night is of course date night, so along with three other boats (Persistence, Daneli and Basta!), we all came up from Puerto Vallarta at the same time, we went into town. We took a bus. The traffic was so bad that we could have walked faster. Some of the highlights were: a Cadillac Escalade with three young ladies on the roof; young ladies sitting on car or truck door windows signing or yelling I couldn’t tell the difference; not once but twice a car in front of us stopped so the driver could get into the trunk to refresh his beer supply.
We had a nice dinner and a couple of drinks. Our kids won’t believe it, but six of us rode home in the back of a pickup truck sitting next to two huge blearing speakers doing the YMCA song, rocking the truck and yelling at the crowds.
Toto, we are not in Kansas anymore. The cruising life can be a lot of fun.
Our future intentions are to cross over to the Baja peninsula from here then up the Baja side of the Sea of Cortez to the latitude of San Carlos. Then cross the Sea again to San Carlos, Sonora, Mexico, then put the boat, “on the hard” for the summer. We intend to arrive in San Carlos prior to May 1st give or take a week or two. We will then go into our “dirt dweller” mode for six months.
Short term it doesn’t look like we will have a weather window for the crossing until next weekend.
The really big news is that Good Friday our son Joe told us his lovely wife is pregnant. That will be two for them and our fourth grandchild. Way to go Joe and Dana! You make us extremely happy.
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