KEEP ON CRUISING
Thursday, 29 December 2005, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Nayarit, Mexico

(Since our flash stick for some inexplicable reason is not functioning and since we are confined to Vilisar waiting for water to be delivered or the diver to show up – the equivalent ashore of waiting for the plumber-, getting blogs posted has become rather difficult. If we get ashore, where we have not been now for going on four days, then we have to take the laptop ashore. This is risky because there is a lot of surf running, big swells rolling in from the Pacific and refracting around the breakwall into the harbour where we land on the beach. These are combined with the seasonal high tides in December. Although we usually manage things without getting more than the hems on our shorts wet, there is always a risk of getting a good soaking and even of capsizing the boat right at the shore. Apologies to those waiting for a current blog. We have not been totally idle, however: Please know that our brightwork is beginning to look really great.)

The anchorage is thinning out. Every day boats, almost exclusively sailboats, head out for the south after having spent Christmas here. Many had visitors over the Christmas period and many came here in December so they get to a handy airport for holiday flights to family back in Seattle, Chicago, or Los Angeles. We hear the vessels announcing their departure on the morning Cruisers’ Net, we witness them hauling up their anchors and motoring out towards Cabo Corrientes some thirty miles away. From our discussions with other cruisers we know that some will be coming back up here in the spring and then continuing on north to the Sea of Cortés where they will either spend the summer aboard or, putting their boat up on the hard in La Paz or San Carlos, head to cooler climes until the new cruising season begins in the fall. Others like us plan to continue south. Some will go to French Polynesia and beyond; some will head to Central America where Costa Rica is a favourite destination); some will go through the Panama Canal into the Caribbean; and, a few, like us now, will head for Ecuador and/or the Galapagos.

Before he entered the cruising fraternity, Jens thought it was totally exotic and bizarre to be a bluewater cruiser. But once you are surrounded by other cruisers it is just everyday stuff. He is a few illusions poorer: cruising has very little to do with blue waters and white sails and gin & tonic on deck, although all these are part of the scene. I am not sure if that realisation makes cruising more or less interesting for him. We had the same experience of shedding illusions. The education was intensified once we left familiar Canada and the U.S.A. and arrived in Mexico. You and all your cruising companions are “at sea” initially. Everybody is trying to get the know-how and the skills needed to be a bluewater cruiser, to survive in a foreign country, to decide if one really wants to be doing this.

Of course, there has to be a first cruise. For many, it is from Cape Flattery, Washington, or San Diego. If they get beaten up off the Oregon or Baja-California coast, that’s it. Never again! It’s not for nothing that La Paz is sometimes referred to as the graveyard of cruising dreams. Others, like us and many others, have survived some bad moments at sea, swallowed hard a few times, muttered a silent prayer of deliverance, tried to learn from the experience, to adjust our boat gear and/or sailing technique to deal with specific problems, realised that perhaps there’s nothing to go back to anyway, and so just carry on. Time heals all wounds and the frights fade into the background. You find that everyone here has been through something similar or worse and are still sailing. You get used to high waves and noisy winds. You get it figured out. As one experienced cruiser told me, the answer to anxiety is frequently just developing a new skill. Learning to heave to in heavy weather or better anchoring techniques, for example. And having experienced something once, maybe you won’t be so frightened the next time.

The fun parts are easy to deal with. Aside the frightening part, there is the boring parts or the trying parts or the frustrating parts. With a wooden boat, we have a fair bit of maintenance to do to keep Vilisar beautiful and fit. People are forever commenting about how much work a “woodie” must be. But all boats have engines, rigging, sails and hulls that need to be cleaned, waxed, buffed or even repainted. And every recreational fibreglass, steel or aluminium boat that I have ever seen also has at least some and frequently a lot of brightwork that needs varnishing. So non-woodies require a lot of work too. It seems that certain painted or varnished parts of Vilisar need annual attention – especially those portions that the sun can attack directly - and we set aside time now for this when the weather is most suitable. Some parts probably need attention every other year; our wooden mast has held up very well after several Cetol coats in Long Beach 15 months ago so we will wait another year to re-do it.

The sails are taking a beating though.

P.S. (Friday, 30 December 2005) Rode in with Jens and family in their inflatable this morning to get to the net. Kathleen is staying on the boat in hops of getting water delivered or that the diver will show up.


THINGS ARE NEVER AS BAD OR AS GOOD AS THEY FIRST APPEAR
Wednesday, 28 December 2005, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Nayarit, Mexico

We are slow getting started this morning. I still have the taste of frustration in my mouth from our voyage over to PV yesterday. After the morning net this morning I talk on VHF to Rick and Penny who recommended and introduced us to Pancho, the diver, to tell him that I missed meeting him at PV yesterday. I also talk to Jens on VHF and he agrees to take our four 5-gallon blue water jugs ashore to see if he can get them filled. He calls later from Philo’s Bar in La Cruz to say that Philo has found somebody who will deliver ten bottles to us aboard Vilisar this afternoon. A bit expensive but put into perspective, we decide to go for it. Maybe things are not as bad as they first appeared.

I also ask Philo if there is a local diver who would undertake to clean our hull. After a bit of scouting around he says that he has located somebody locally but he wants $2 per foot. A bit of dickering follows: I tell Philo that we paid $1 a foot of waterline in both Long Beach and San Carlos and that seems to be about the going rate. After a long radio silence Philo comes back to say the diver agrees to do it for $1 per foot plus a one-time charge of Pesos 50. He will b charging us the LOD (length on deck) length rather than waterline but, given Vilisar’s out-hung rudder and steep bow and stern, there is not much difference (Veleda, for example, has a sharp pointy bow and a long overhanging stern; while its LOD is 35 feet, at the waterline there is only about 25 feet). So, we will be paying about Pesos 400 to have Vilisar’s bottom cleaned up. The diver, Philo says, should be there in less than an hour. Then Philo makes a general announcement to “The Fleet” in La Cruz to the effect that a diver is available today on the cruisers’ net and another boat takes him up on the offer. Now, things are really looking up. Things were not so bad after all.

I talk on the radio to Terry of S/V Ishi. We met Gary, her husband, last week. They sailed to Ecuador from Costa Rica last year so we had an interesting discussion about wintering down there. She told us that Bahia de Caráquez was very comfortable and very safe – both physically as an anchorage and from the point of view of personal or property security. Cruisers there were constantly going off to travel in the Andes and the cruiser community mounted an organised security patrol amongst themselves to keep an eye on empty boats. They never experienced any trouble there whatsoever beyond a stolen t-shirt from a dinghy and, of course, there were no hurricanes to worry about. She and a girlfriend also travelled for several weeks throughout the country; they didn’t stint but it came out to only about $25 a day all found for hotels, food, travel and activities like alpine train rides, horseback riding, tours, etc. “It is very cheap and absolutely fascinating,” she said with enthusiasm. This sounds like our kind of destination. They did not get visas or cruising permits beforehand; they just sailed there from Costa Rica and did the paperwork when they got there. She offered to put us in touch by email with cruisers already there who could fill us in on any details we needed. To avoid the Golfo de Tehuantepec gale-force blasts that are funnelled and intensified as they come through the mountains in lower Mexico from the Caribbean to the Pacific, Ischi went 300 miles offshore when sailing to Costa Rico from Puerto Vallarta. They still got hit by a one-day gale. Jumping off for Ecuador or the Galapagos Islands from Acapulco should make it possible to get well offshore.

All this is very encouraging. It makes me want to get going again. If we can get water today and the hull is cleaned we shall be ready to leave to go farther south along the so-called Mexican Riviera after we get last-minute provisions in La Cruz. All the time we shall have Acapulco and Ecuador in our minds.

Jens comes over this morning to get out of Steven’s hair; Steven is doing his high-school homework and, outgoing and energetic as he is, Jens, his dad, is disturbing him. Steven finally complained and Jens decided he ought to get off the boat for a while. Never a bad idea when tensions rise.

Jens is feeling a bit better about cruising now too, although I think if Alice and Steven weren’t in favour of continuing, he would take the first best off for the boat and head back to Victoria. But, they will wait for the end of the month to get their pension cheque and then they will head south too. Maybe we will buddy-boat a little. Now that they have had a chance to recover from their rough handling on the trip down from Canada, they have recovered their esprit. And, while Jens still talks about selling, two sentences later he is talking about moving on and saying out loud that, while things were definitely not as good as he had anticipated when he set sail from Victoria, when he reviews things in his mind, things are also not as bad .

Steven, 14, is home-schooling himself with the help of his parents. He follows the curriculum of his home province, British Columbia, and is in continuous email contact with his own Department of Education teacher back home. Jens says there is never any problem about getting the boy to do his homework and the parents only need to give Steven the quiet he needs to get it done. This does not take very long each day, a few hours at most. There is a lot of time-wasting at a regular school: spare periods, gym, commuting to and fro, extra-curricular activities. He is otherwise free to go ashore with Dad or just goof off. Jens says he misses a couple of his friends in Victoria but otherwise is extremely happy on Veleda.

Later

Kathleen and I spent several hours finishing up the sanding and prepping and then getting on a coat of Cetol on the cabin trim, the handrails, the skylight, the lightboards and the fife rails. In the spring of 2004 I gave all these things several Cetol coats in Long Beach as well as enhanced UV protection by finishing off with a gloss coat of Cetol. The intense Mexican sun and the nearly daily salt water we throw on the decks and cabin have taken their toll. The brightwork looks dull and lifeless. Just from the constant use of the boat, things like tying fenders to the handrails, the brightwork becomes chipped as well. We are having perfect painting weather. By midday the temperatures are in the high seventies and there is a good breeze. It is fun to be outside and wielding a paint brush, even given the fact that the fresh paint makes the rest of the boat look even worse.

Our topside (i.e. the white-painted portion between the waterline and the decks) looks very dreary indeed. For one, the dinghy bangs against it and chips the paint; for another, the water we dump on the painted-cedar decks to keep them tight eventually causes rust-like stains where they run off under the caprails. The colour is the same as the stain on the topsides just above the anti-fouling paint where the tropical seawater laps against the hull and leaves a very unsightly line of green growth. We wonder if it appears to viewers as a lack of maintenance. In fact, it comes about because we are taking care to keep lots of salt water on the decks.

The acrylic non-skid porch paint that I got from Ron and Heather aboard M/V Despite Alimony (sic) back in Long Beach has generally worked well. But it has tended to lift in a few places. This may be because the paint underneath had not been sanded enough. Without non-skid surfaces (basically fine sand added to the paint), trying to do anything on a wet foredeck is very treacherous indeed. I know because I have been out there before I applied non-skid and it was like ice-skating.

The trouble with starting to paint is that you soon have to empty the lazarette storage hold to get what you need. However, as long as one does not bite off too much for one day, it is possible to sand and paint some every day here in Mexico even if one is moving.

Late afternoon

The diver has never shown up. Philo said on the radio that the diver was going to go home and get his gear and head right out. He had several boats to do thanks to Philo’s efforts on his behalf. Never did hear back from Philo. We’ll try again tomorrow. Of course, the waterman never showed up either. Things are never as good or bad as they first appear. I guess we should just shrug and say, “This is Mexico!” At least we had a satisfying day doing brightwork. And Jens has just come by to invite us over to Veleda after we finish eating our omelette and home-fries.

TANKING DIESEL FUEL AND WATER IN PUERTO VALLARTA AND HAVING THE BOTTOM SCRUBBED
Tuesday, 27 December 2005, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Nayarit, Mexico

We are supposed to be at the Pemex fuel dock in Marina Vallarta by 1300 to meet Pancho, the diver who is going to scrub our hull of the disgusting accretion of slime and barnacles. Last night we calculated 2½ hours to cover the roughly nine miles using the engine. We get started on schedule at 1030 but we can never seem to get going faster than about 2.5 knots. Perhaps it is the barnacles underneath that are slowing us down. Even the smallest amount of growth on the underwater portions of a vessel can have a very large impact on speed and fuel efficiency. If the prop is also coated, which is also usually the case, one is really slowed down. It is rapidly clear that we are not going to be meeting Pancho on time. Not long after we start we are overtaken by Cetacean and we ask Ron and Judy to leave a message at the fuel dock for Pancho to say that we are on the way but will likely be two hours late. We chug along in the warm sunshine wondering why we are so slow; Kathleen says that it’s as if we are trying to make headway in honey.

About 1430 we finally enter the channel into the Marina Vallarta. It is narrow and lined with yachts. The fuel dock involves a tricky to turn in a tight space. Kathleen does a terrific job of shoehorning Vilisar into the dock only for us to be told that we have to move to another part of the dock, a floating pier that is even trickier to get into. When we finally tie up we ask if Pancho is around. “Oh, he waited about twenty minutes and then left.” I guess he had other commitments. We have no way of reaching him.

As we start to fuel up, we ask about water. “No water here,” says the attendant. “And you don’t want to drink the tap water here anyway. You have to buy bottled water and we don’t have any here either. And by the way, you can’t stay here at the fuel dock; we need the space.” After a long discussion we engage a very dark and muscular young man named “Chapis” to whisk Kathleen away in his motorised panga a store near the water to pick up bottled water. As they leave I wonder if Kathleen will throw up cruising and run off with Chapis. I return to putting diesel fuel into the tank.

The attendants relent a little and pull Vilisar ahead out of the way of the growing pandemonium around the fuel dock. The day’s fishing is over and the sports fishermen are refuelling before putting their boats away. The channel is only about two boat lengths wide and the fishermen are trying to grab parking space at the dock, cutting each other off and leaving no room for anyone else to get in or out. Meanwhile Chapis returns Kathleen to the dock and manages to squeeze his panga in beside Vilisar. Unfortunately, they have only managed after much negotiating and figuring to find four bottles of water. We pour them into the port tank and pay Chapis for his efforts. This has turned into rather expensive water. Maybe we should just fill the tank with beer.

Getting out of the dock is a task. While we are waiting for the trawler blocking us to finish refuelling a fishing boat crashes into a sailboat. There is an argument. Right in front of our spot there must be five or six boats jostling for the next refuelling spot. We just start backing out with the dock attendant guiding the dinghy so we don’t back over the painter. Compared to a motor vessel or a fin-keel, Vilisar is very unmanoeuvrable in tight spots and going astern is always a big problem. After several efforts backing and forwarding, we finally get back into the channel heading out.

So, we have refuelled, picked up twenty gallons of luxury water, and still do not have the bottom cleaned. As we come out of the channel, we ask two guys on a boat “Puerto Securidad” written on the side and tied to a green buoy if we can anchor at the side of the channel. “After ten o’clock at night,” one of them says. So that is not going to be an option. We keep on out into Banderas Bay to find a light breeze blowing. Hoping to pick up a bit more speed for the return to La Cruz, I get busy getting all the sail covers off, the halyards rigged, and the sails hoisted. Motorsailing close hauled, that gets us up to over 4 knots, a quite respectable speed for old “Barnacle Vilisar”. The afternoon is well advanced and even if the wind holds we are only going to be able to squeak into the anchorage just before dark about two hours hence.

We are a bit drained and frustrated after our day-trip to Marina Vallarta. It was awful in there. The hectic activity, the frustration at getting anything completed satisfactorily, even the refuelling. As always, being the new guy in a place means you have no experience with local conditions and you wind up paying through the nose. For budget cruisers this can be a little scary. Seeing the people cavorting on the hotel beaches all along the coast made me think about giving up cruising, travelling by bus or airplane to places we wanted to see.

With the sails set and the boat on a gentle reach back to La Cruz, we gather ourselves again and begin to see the brighter side of things. Nothing irrevocable has occurred, no damage done or anyone injured. We still have a little cash to get us by and nothing is forever.

The wind dies shortly before sunset, the big red sun diving through some light cloud into the western sea. I pull in all the sails. They are already wet from the dew. We are still doing 3 knots, which means either that we have a little current in our favour or the movement of the boat has polished the prop and rudder a little bit.

It is, however, thoroughly dark as we approach La Cruz. There are lights along the coast and Kathleen is confused by them. I go on deck from the cabin and try to get my night vision. I have made note in my mind of the various lights around the coast so I am fairly well oriented. With the 50x7 binoculars you can really make out a lot more than with the naked eye at night. I spot the sailboats at anchor only some of which have anchor lights switched on. But I can make them out in the dark. As we get in close to them Kathleen becomes very apprehensive and wants to anchor way out. But, for a long time, the depth sounder is getting no reading below sixty feet. Not only do I not want to have to row into shore from way out, I do not want to have to pull up the anchor from a great depth if I can avoid it. While she feels she is blind in the dark, I believe I can see well enough. We have a little battle but I insist we go slowly forward on the engine with me standing on the foredeck using binoculars to see and the flashlight to give Kathleen directions for the helm.

I begin to recognise our old neighbours in the anchorage and we turn to circle behind S/V Veleda and, through the binoculars I even see somebody sitting in their cockpit, Jens or Steven. We move forward of them and drop the hook in about 25 feet of water and long, oily swells. We are almost back in exactly our old spot. Kathleen is still a bit angered that I insisted on going in so close at night. I would probably never go into a strange harbour or anchorage at night. But I am familiar with La Cruz now. All’s well that ends well. After a couple of hot dogs and something to drink, it is nearly time to get to bed.



BOXING DAY 2005
Tuesday, 27 December 2005, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Nayarit, Mexico

As we prepare to depart from La Cruz in the next couple of days, we take a day to travel by bus back into Puerto Vallarta to take a look at the Old Town and possibly hook up with a friend-of-a-friend. We also want to test our headphones to see if they will work on another computer. They refused to work on our laptop and one or two others around here.

“Old Town” PV is on the far side of the river from the Church of the Virgin of Guadalupe where we had witnessed the processions and services when we first arrived two weeks ago. The town was made famous (or infamous) when John Houston came to this sleepy fishing village to film Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner. Our boy Richard was having a torrid affair with Elizabeth Taylor and she followed him here so he wouldn’t get the wandering eye, I guess. Eventually Taylor built a house cum love nest in PV. That was the end of the sleepy village; it turned into a cosmopolitan beach and hotel centre. Tourism – hotels, charter flights, rented flats, time shares, the works - is not only PV’s main enterprise. It is its only enterprise. We think the Old Town might be interesting to see before leaving. It isn’t. The beach is lined with thatched palapas, swarming with trinket salesmen, and tiled with scorched sunbathers; the streets, on the other hand, are lined with over-priced-trinket stalls, fast-talking time-share pimps, and of course, sunburned tourists.

There are quite a few internet cafes but they are over-priced. At last we find a reasonable one and check our email. We also do a little net surfing about places to head for in Ecuador (Anyone interested should start with Jimmy Cornell’s www.noonsite.com, which is designed with bluewater cruisers in mind.) More importantly, we try calling Kathleen’s parents in Catonsville, Maryland. That works fine so we try calling my Mum in Dallas, Texas. She lives in a nursing home and is generally never in her room when we are trying to reach her. By some sort of miracle she happens to be near the phone at midday and we have a wonderful chat. After her bout of hospitalisation she sounds her old self and it is wonderful to hear her. I was very relieved to finally get hold of her. We have not been able to reach her since we last saw her in person at her 90th birthday celebration in Dallas on 31 July.

The news about Ecuador is promising. It confirms that the climate from May to November is dry and temperate. Marina Santa Lucia near Salinas is quite new and has reasonable rates. It also has haulout facilities and is secure enough to leave one’s vessel there to travel inland. Entry and exit fees for Ecuador are minimal and the US dollar is now the official currency. But there are two flies in the ointment: tourist visas are limited to only three months (though it appears they can easily be extended). Second, you cannot get a cruising permit for the Galapagos Islands from Ecuador itself. It either has to be granted outside of the country by an Ecuadorian consulate or one simply clears Ecuador for the Marquesas and make an “emergency stop” in Wreck Bay where one will be granted a 72-hour pass. In fact, if we leave Mexico from Acapulco it is 500 Nm closer to sail first to the Galapagos before sailing on to Ecuador. All this needs more work.

We get to chatting with the young Mexican woman in charge of the shop and show her how to use SKYPE for calling. Before leaving, we also ask her where we can find a good lunch – bueno pero menos caro. Without hesitation she tells us to head for Comida Economica Dianita about five blocks away. “Muy bueno y non caro.” There we find a small room with about six white plastic tables. We are placed at a table with a Mexican diner named Manuel who runs a rent-a-car outlet in town. For Pesos 40 (about US$ 4) we have a large two-course comida corrida (daily special) that allows a choice of three starters (Kathleen has Crema de Verdura; I have Lentil Soup. Both are great) and eight main dishes (Kathleen has Bistec estufado –stuffed beef- and I have Machacho Ranchero – it looks in fact like the same beef but is shredded and covered in a tomato sauce: again, both are great). We are also given a picture of iced Jamaica as part of the price, Jamaica a common non-alcoholic drink in Mexico made from hibiscus blossoms.

That girl at the internet café sure knew what she was talking about. Not only is the food delicious, we also learn a few things about Mexican etiquette from Manuel such as whether it is permissible to join a stranger at a table if the restaurant is already full (Por favor, puedo sentarme?) The whole thing is fun and we feel again like we are in contact with Mexico.

Before leaving town we take a walk through the park on the island in the river. It is shady but full of souvenir stalls or cafes. It is a nice little oasis, however, from the traffic noise and, where we entered, was reached by a swinging (and I mean swinging) footbridge. Stopping to look down into the river we saw three huge iguanas on a sloping tree on the far bank about fifty feet away. The two little ones are about 18 inches long. The third has great yellow spines down its back and very large wattles hanging below its chin, which it wagged ferociously from time to time. In case you ever get stuck for a menu idea, you should know that iguanas can be eaten for their meat. But I think it was not just the fact that we had recently had a delicious lunch that made the idea less than attractive.

Having finished our business in town, we drift back along the Malecón and catch a local bus out to the bus-transfer centre in front of Wal-Mart. After darting in for provisions, we squeeze into the crowded Punta de Mita bus bound for La Cruz. We are drowsy from our lunch and our walk, glad that we have reached our parents by phone, and happy that we will be back aboard Vilisar before dark.

Getting off the bus we bump into another cruising couple, Ron and Judy off S/V Cetacean, Portland, Oregon. In the few blocks down to the beach we make a fast cruiser-acquaintanceship and invite them to come over to Vilisar to sample the cold beer we have just brought from town. The day fades out with a couple of hours of chat with a very nice couple.


CHRISTMAS DAY 2005
Monday, 26 December 2005, La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, Nayarit, Mexico

Our Christmas Day at anchor in La Cruz started off as nearly every day aboard with slow coffee-drinking. Today there is some desultory discussion about plans for the day and about cruising in springtime to Ecuador. The swells are low and the skies clear so I got another coat of Cetol on the port lightboard. A few more coats and I shall mount it again with the port light. Eventually, we wrap our little white-elephant gifts, get into our goin’-ashore duds and push off to row ashore in the dinghy. We land this time relatively dry and pull the dinghy well up above high-water mark and walk up to the internet café.