CHAMELA PICTURES

Here are some pictures from the Chamela anchorage where Mirador sat for a week in early April waiting for a favorable weather window to head north around Cabo Corrientes.

This is the reef that sticks out from Punta Perula on the SW corner of Bahia Chamela.  It is separated from the mainland by about 400 yards of open water.  The reef is barely visible when the seas are calm and the tide is high. This picture was taken from Mirador while at anchor in Bahia Chamela.  The swells were about four or five feet on the day I took this picture.  My Canon IS90 digital camera has the equivalent of a 310mm optical zoom lens.

The following three pictures show how the panga drivers park their boats.  This guy  will ride a 3' wave into the beach and then accelerate as hard as he can to drive the boat up on the sand.  That panga is about 22' long and has a 75 HP outboard on it. 

Notice in the following picture that the parking attendant in the clean white tee shirt on the beach is signaling which space the panga should aim for. The guy in the blue and white shirt to the far right of the picture is holding a smooth round log that the panga will drive up and over so they can use the log as a roller when they want to move the boat.  They will eventually put four or five smooth logs under the boat to roll it around.

In this picture the panga is on the beach and the engine is still going full speed. The panga driver is starting to tilt the engine up so the prop doesn't dig too deep a hole in the sand.

There were about 15 pangas on the beach that went out to fish each day.  Most of them were using monofilament nets that they set suspended from lines on the surface.  The anchors for the nets are made of of re-bar that has been welded together and then bent into the shape of a large grapnel.  This boat is about the same size as the one being beached in the previous photo. 

The pangas are built with two mini-keels along the aft third of the boat.  The keels take the brunt of the force of beaching the boat and prevent the bottom from being ground away as the panga hits the beach at 20 knots.

Every outboard used by the pangas, up to about 95 HP, are pull start.  The only engines I have seen with electric starts are the 115 HP Mercs that are on the 30 foot pangas.

Ryokosha was anchored about 150 yards away and would almost disappear when the bigger swell rolled in.

Here are Mirador and Dream Reach anchored off the beach at Chamela.  You can see the waves breaking on the reef in the far distance.  This is the shape of the breaking wave that I was worried about getting the Portabote out thru as described in my April 8 WEB update. 

Sometimes the surf the combination of tide levels and swell size make beach landings impossible for a while.  Here is what it looks like from just outside the surf zone.

And finally... here is a view of Dream Reach with Punta Perula and the Pacific Ocean in the distance.