Cental America
And Back
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No moss is going to grow on us. Absolutely not. Mold and mildew yes, certainly, but we are moving much to fast for moss. We left zTown (that's the kewl way of saying Zihuatenajo) Mexico yesterday. We didn't want to. We had met up with old and new friends and wanted to spend more time playing. In addition, I had slept in the cockpit (because it was so friggin hot) and woke up with a broken wing. A frozen and extremely painful left shoulder. But the wing seemed to be getting better, partly due to some cruising friends and their medicine cabinet, and the weather window was closing so off we went.
The day was perfect, beautiful day-scapes with fog drifting in and around the mountains all along the way. Did you know all those misty peaks could be hiding pyramids? Why don't they dig them up?
By mid morning the sea breeze was non-existent and the sea surface turned to glass. I headed for my newly made "Dolphin Hunter Seat", a highly technical item made of vinyl mesh, brass eyelets and string. But it's the perfect place to wait for Flipper and company. I wasn't there for even four minutes and he shows up with his wife and children and the cousins. Very nice of them to be on time.
Technically, Flipper was a bottle-nose dolphin and these dolphin are, you guessed it; Spotted Dolphin. They are smaller, weighing in around 250 lbs when fully grown. They are born without the spots and start getting them around adolescence between 6 and 10 years. That's also when they start smoking and hanging around on corners. Kidding, just trying to make sure you're paying attention.
I wasn't exactly well on this trip, after Flipper and the kids left, I spent a fair amount of time in the head (sorry, the truth hurts me more than you). The broken wing was apparently just a for-runner, and I was ill for the rest of the trip. Dois was a stud and held up my side of the boat as well as his. We are in Manzanillo at anchorage in Santiago Bay. We are going to sit here for a couple of days and hopefully get well enough to do some snorkeling at Bahia Carazal.
We'll re-provision here for the next leg of the trip up to Puerto Vallarta. It's a bit of a headache to go shopping from this anchorage, but what are you going to do? We'll have to find a "safe" place for the dinghy on the beach and then hike up to the highway. There, we'll grab a bus into town. We'll take a taxi back because it's hard to maneuver all those groceries onto a bus, and the taxi will get us near a beach and we'll schlep our supplies back down to the dinghy and eventually... the boat. Don't you wish you were us?
So what is it... a gaggle, a herd, a pack or a school of dolphin? I vote for a gaggle.
Peace
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Alcapulco really isn't a bad place. It's not what it used to be, and you should always, always have a military presence with you if you wander off the main road, but it's the only place where you can stand on your head in the middle of the street. We had to wait out a pretty nasty storm there so we decided to use the docks at La Marina, for a price of course, but then there's power on the dock (read air conditioning in our aft cabin). Alcapulco rained hard, and when in rains there, every bit a trash that these folks have been saving up in their gullies, alley ways and streets flushe into the caldera-like bay. Now there is at least a 20 foot wide "bath tub ring" of plastic bottles and other assorted plastics and garbage all the way around the bay. The locals don't appear worry too much about it because they know it will flush out of the bay and into the Pacific Ocean just like a giant toilet bowl. Out of sight out of mind. I wonder if this is one of the reasons we saw so very little sea life in or around their little bay. But they do have the cutest little things living in the bushes. We left Acapulco on May 10th and arrived Zihuatanejo on May 11th, my first son's birthday, Happy Birthday Donnie! I love taking photo's after a storm. You get the most beautiful sunset shots. Peace
The Gulfo de Tehuantepec. Tehuantepec means "hill of the demons" and refers to a ferocious tribe of warriors that once terrorized the area, but demon winds are a continuing feature. The winds blow extraordinarily large, from both north and south. They can blow so hard, they literally part the sea and cause currents on each side of the gulf.
We had a consistent 20 knot headwind from the start, the evil we chose. Dois had cleaned up the autopilot connections and found a setting that Hal, our recalcitrant autopilot seemed to like and was much more amenable behaved for the first two days of the voyage. But Hal still refuses to play in large swell or steep wind waves, of which we found both. It wasn't a pleasant ride, Ashika rising steeply on 10 to 12 foot waves, her bow clearing the crest and then plunging abruptly down into the trough before taking on the next wall of water. Our new coffee maker flew through the cabin on one of these roller coaster moments leaving coffee grounds and the remnants of the morning's coffee dripping down the companion way ladder filling the nooks and crannies of the teak and holly floor boards. The conditions were very wet; Ashika taking water over the decks, Captain and crew sweating buckets. I changed three times, Dois just removed clothing. And it seemed the conditions were deteriorating as we maneuvered through a freighter mooring field outside of Salinas, so we headed for Punta Chipehua about 10 miles south. There was no moon and we risked an instrument landing again. The map showed a long sandy shoreline ending in a hook and a 25 ft shelf, so we pointed Ashika in that direction. When the depth finder said 37 feet we could hear crashing waves to our right. When the depth finder said 35 feet, we could hear crashing waves to our left, huh? We stopped the boat to listen, there must be an uncharted reef out there, but nothing bad was happening so we dropped out anchor right there. Dois was up and down all night checking to make sure no waves were sweeping us toward shore. We could see the breaking reef clearly in the bright sunshine of morning, but the reed sheltered us rather than endangered us. Luck fairies are alive and well. It was eight am and we had 50 miles to go before the wind picked up. Hualtulco seemed so very far away.
I awoke again, the roll of the anchorage had allowed me to fall asleep for a brief time before another large set of waves would roll me against the bulk head waking me up for the umpteenth time. I had had enough. I climbed over Dois without waking him up, which is a testament to how tired he must have been. I turned on the red overhead light and checked the time, 4:10 AM. We had agreed to stay here in Amapala one more day, awaiting the best possible weather window. The bay is in Honduras and we were not checked in, so there was no going ashore to get even a small reprieve from the incessant roll. I sat down on the settee facing Dois wondering if he would sleep through the next violent roll. I didn't have to wait long. He opened his eyes and I said "let's go". He said "I'll get the anchor, you start the engine". Apparently he was rolled enough too.
This was not the best way to start a voyage. We were tired, but we thought that we would be able to catch up on our sleep taking turns on watch and it couldn't be worse than Amapala. The waves that had been rolling us around the anchorage were bigger outside the bay and there was a mean cross swell as well. Throw in a 20 to 30 knot breeze on our port bow and we had ourselves a party. Unfortunately, Hal, our unfaithful auto-pilot didn't want to come to our little party and every time we turned him on, he would do something devious like turn us around, heading back the way we came. Hal seems to have lost his mind.... A hot wind howls through the mangrove and with it comes ash and dirt. We are anchored in an estuary in Corinto, Nicaragua. Each morning Dois rinses the decks down with salt water or we would be walking in mud. Ae are safe and secure and the people in Nicaragua are really good to us. They just like to burn the fields this time of year. We are leaving Nicaragua tomorrow morning looking for fresher air in Mexiico. Finally, finally I caught a decent fish. I hadn't caught anything worth eating since we left Mexico over a year ago. Granted, half of that year was spent on the hook in a polluted anchorage, but still...
I think it was a small yellow fin tuna by most anybody's standards, maybe 20 lbs. But I was thrilled. The red meat down here has been mostly tough and tasteless and all the freshest fish goes to the restaurants, so we eat a lot of chicken... chicken alfredo, baked chicken, chicken burritos, chicken sandwiches... you get the idea, I was starting to cluck.
Despacio, it means "slow down"... some people choose to ignore it. We were forced to slow down by a Papagayo wind event. We tried to get to Playa Del Coco by Thursday so we could check out by Friday and sail on the weather window at dawn Saturday. Instead, we slowed way down. We ended up in Papagayo Marina and washed up everything while waiting for Monday morning.
Bahia Ballena, Costa Rica
When we left our two wanna-be heroes, they had burst forth from the jungle with a troop of hungry Capuchin rascals hot on their heels. The captain and crew of Ashika barely escaped inside the largest cage in the compound; the dining hall. All of the enclosures in this remote park in Costa Rica were built to contain humans. People are housed in buildings built with endemic rough sawn forest timber and decorated with chicken wire. Our adventurers would eat the feast laid out for them in the relative safety of a jungle cage.
Having some serious success at smashing the hands of time, the reefs of the Tortuga Islands were once again beckoning Ashika's crew. They decided to take another try at staying in the lovely bays of Isla Alcatraz and Isla Tolinga.
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