ON THE WAY TO ZIHUATENEJO

It is Saturday, about 1 PM local time (CST), and Mirador is at 18° 44.3" N by 104°11.9' W which is about 15miles west of the Mexican mainland, and about 18 miles SSE of Manzanillo .  I left Bahia Tenacatita at 4:15 AM today and am now 55 NM SE of there, headed for Zihuatenejo which is about 170 NM SE of my present location.  I plan to travel non-stop to Z-town but will stop at the anchorage NE of Isla Grande, about 9 miles before the inner harbor at Zihuatenejo.  If I continue at the current speed I should be able to drop anchor well before sunset tomorrow night, Sunday January 25.

I'm stopping at Isla Grande because I don't want to try to find my way into crowded and busy Zihuatenejo late in the evening when I will be pretty tired from a 37 hour trip.  I'll spend the night at Isla Grande and then find my way to the cruiser anchorage before noon on Monday, when I am well rested and the sun is shining.

I have been motoring or motorsailing since I left Tenacatitia.  I unfurled the genoa and let it pull us along for a while with the diesel running at 2000 RPMs.  But the wind died completely at sunrise and it is now flat water and calm wind.

Right now I am busy plotting the movements of three ocean going vessels that are all within 12 miles of me. Two are headed towards Mirador and one is following me.  Manzanillo is a busy port and I have seen a lot of big ship traffic since passing the harbor entrance earlier today.  Mirador is headed SE (119° Magnetic) at 6 knots and all the ships coming from the Panama Canal to Manzanillo, Puerto Vallarta, and Mazatlan seem to be headed exactly opposite me about a mile further from shore than is Mirador.  I'm pretty comfortable with a radar plotting board and can keep a close eye on them with radar.  The visibility is OK, about 7 miles in haze, but the Raytheon R20XX radar works great.

I left La Cruz at 4:30AM January 17 and found my way to Ipala, a small anchorage about 30 miles SE of La Cruz, but most importantly it was past Cabo Corrientes.  Corrientes means "currents" in Spanish and it is a proper name.  The Cape sticks way out into the NW flowing current and it also enhances the winds blowing from the NW.  The NW flowing ocean current also meets with the circular tidal current that flows into and out of Banderas Bay. The Corrientes area is always bumpy and usually windy.

I kept Mirador more than six miles off Cabo Corrientes as we approached from the NE but that was not far enough off to avoid the washing machine effect.  The wind was only blowing 7 to 10 knots from the NE but the ugly piles of water were over 5' and moving every direction at once.  Mirador was rolling 25° every 15 seconds, the bow was pitching up and down 10° every 10 seconds, and the bow was yawing constantly.  The motion was about as violent as I have experienced in Mirador and it went on for several hours. 

That morning was the one of the few times I felt badly due to the motion of the boat.  I took a dose of Stugeron about 5:30 AM and another about 8:30 AM.  It was very hard to do anything except sit and brace against a bulkhead.  The seas became more organized and regular as we got further west of the point.  After the sun rose at 7:40 AM I had to start watching for "long lines." 

The panaga fisherman set out a mile or two of heavy monofilament line strung between clear 2 liter pop bottles or white chlorine bottles.  They suspend lines with multiple hooks on them from the monofilament that is held on the surface by the "floats" which are almost impossible to see.  They do not mark the lines or the floats in any fashion.  Twice, I had to detour a mile west to clear two sets of lines.  I also made shorter dodges around several other lines.

Today I have seen about a dozen of the long lines but they are set differently down here, 100 miles south of Corrientes.  The surface lines are heavier and sag deeper in the water so Mirador can go over the top of the line, between two floats, without snagging the line.  She did snag three of the lines on Tuesday while sailing from Chamela to Tenacatita.  I was able to back off two of the lines but had to cut one of them. 

We had a nice sail from just west of Corrientes all the way to Ipala but it was into a head wind which is not supposed to happen this time of the year.  The wind was coming out of the SE which was exactly where Mirador had to sail towards.  Later in the afternoon the wind moved around to the SW so we could reach all the way into the anchorage but that also meant the wind was blowing directly into the anchorage.

Ipala is noted for having a rocky bottom that is not easy to anchor in.  I dropped the 66# spade in 20' of water and let out 65' of chain.  I left the engine in reverse at 1200 RPM for a while to dig the anchor in. I then slowly increased the power to 2200 RPM at which time the chain went "clunk" and the boat lurched backwards.  I again let the anchor sit for a couple of minutes with the engine at 1000 RPM to dig it in.  I again slowly ran the Yanmar up to 2000 RPM where I heard another clunk and again felt Mirador lurch backwards.  The beach was only 50 yards astern so I decided to pick up the anchor, move to deeper water, and try to find a sandy spot in which to drop the anchor.

I pulled as much chain as I could by hand and was quite surprised when ALL the chain came up and there was no spade anchor attached to the end of it.  There was, however, a swivel with a straight eye that had broken where it joins the body of the swivel.  It was a single casting, made in China, and it appears there was a defect in the casting where it broke.

I was very glad to see that the float was still attached to the anchor so all I had to do was swim down 20', attach a line to the shackle on the anchor, and bring that line back to the surface.   A friend in the boat next to Mirador saw what happened and said his wife was out diving with a local hookah diver and would be back shortly.

The hooka guy did all the work for me but he did charge $60 for the 10 minutes work.  At least I got the big spade back within a hour of losing it.  Then I found out that I didn't have anymore 3/8" shackles on the boat so I had to anchor with the 44# Bruce.

The next morning when I tried to leave I discovered that the chain on the Bruce anchor had wrapped around a rock.  So, I had to drive Mirador in a circle to get the chain off the rock.  Then we were off to Chamela, the next anchorage, about 50 miles to the SE.

That turned out to be a great sail.  I used the drifter and full genoa to start and was eventually forced to reef the main and put the heavy genoa out on a pole as the NW wind came up to 20 knots at times.   I spent a day in Chamela and then managed to turn the 29 mile trip from Chamela to Tenacatita into a 50 mile trip. 

It was a beautiful day with nice wind from the NE as I left Chamela under a full main and drifter.  Within a few hours the wind moved around to the SE and steadied out in the 8 to 12 knot range.  The problem was that the course to Tenacatita was to the ESE.  I rolled up the drifter and unrolled the 120% genoa and prepared the boat for upwind sailing.  Mirador sailed hard on the wind for the next five hours, always making 5.6 to 6.3 knots thru the water.  But, during that five hours we only made 18 miles towards Tenacatita.  I did not realize that there was a 1.3 to 1.8 knot current flowing from the SE which was directly from where I wanted to go.

Once I saw the VMG was so low, even when sailing within 20 degrees of the rhumb line, I pulled out the "Sailing Directions" for Western Mexico and read all about the current that was pushing us backwards.  It was too  nice a day to worry about current, and it was kinda' fun sailing upwind again, so I just kept on sailing.  While sailing along at 6.5 knots I hooked what turned out to be a 15#  Crevalle Jack tuna.  I couldn't retrieve it while the boat was moving so fast so I had to furl the genoa and let the main luff.  Earlier I had hooked something even bigger and had fought with it for about 10 minutes, during which time I retrieved only about 10 yards of line.  I was just as happy when, whatever it was, threw the hook off and went free while letting me keep the nice Rapalla lure.

Tenacatita is a beautiful anchorage with a lot of cruiser activity.  Many cruiser spend the entire winter in Tenacatita and Bara de Navidad, just 10 miles to the SE.  We played Bocche Ball and cribbage each afternoon and snorkled during the morning.

I plan to spend several weeks in Tenacatita and several in Chamela on the way back north in March and April.

Well, I've got more boat traffic to plot and dodge so I'll end this update.

Here is part of the Tenancatita cruising gang playing Bocche Ball.  That is Mirador in the distance on the left side of the picture.

This is a picture of Mirador at Tenacatita with part of the Blue Bay hotel and some condos in the background.