February 2020 – GypsyKramer

How do we get where we want to go? As you can see in the top picture, it looks like Gypsy is taking a shortcut over Punta Etiopia. Leaving Chamela and heading for Bahia Tenacatita, we had to round this point. Our US charts, or maps, went really basic and inaccurate somewhere around Mazatlán. We use them as a general neighborhood indicator, but no longer navigate by them. We do use google maps satellite photos that we have imported into OpenCPN, another chart software. The picture on the bottom is this and clearly shows us well off the shore. We also keep an eye out for rocks and land, and if it gets foggy, we can use radar to show us where things we could run into are.

Bahía Tenacatita is about twenty-five miles past Chamela, a motor sail easily done in one day. It’s a bigger, very well protected bay that had about 30 boats anchored in it when we arrived. The north end, where most of the boats anchor, has a palapa (palm roofed) restaurant by the estuary mouth and a hotel/resort a short walk to the east along a beautiful sandy beach. The nearest town is La Manzanilla on the south end of the bay. At Tenacatita there is an active morning radio net, afternoon activities including some very competitive bocce ball on the beach or walking on the beach. Occasionally a couple of games of Mexican Train would get played. After the activities, everyone would meet up at the palapa and then head back to their boats. Friday evenings featured the mayor’s raft up for happy hour.

There are boats that spend months at Tenacatita. The water is warm and clear, great swimming and snorkeling can be had, and a trip up the estuary is fun, either for a dinghy trip to see the mangroves or to head out to the raicilla distillery at the point. The bay is also perfect for a day sail and we saw a mother and baby whale while we were out one afternoon.

Heading up the estuary to the raicilla distillery. Bill went up with a group to tour the distillery and have lunch at the restaurant nearby. Raicilla is similar to tequila, but made from a different agave.
Note the dinghy wheels at the bottom of the photo. Almost everyone with an inflatable uses them. When you get close to shore, the wheels are dropped and in you motor. They make hauling the dinghy up the beach much easier than the drag or carry method.

After about a week in Tenacatita, Bill realized the batteries weren’t fully charging. We have three 80 watt solar panels, and even with running the engine for an hour a day, the charge wouldn’t get above 90 percent. Time for some equalizing. This meant we needed to find a marina and plug into shore power. Equalizing charges at a higher voltage than normal to try to convert the lead sulfate back into lead. The nearest marina is Barra de Navidad, another day sail south.

After a couple of days in the marina, we headed out to the Barra anchorage. Caught a panga into Barra and a combi, a local bus, to Melaque to find an ATM and some groceries. All local transactions are cash, so topping up the funds when you can is important, as not all towns have an ATM. Melaque is larger than Barra and has some decent abarrotes, or small mini markets, and a big grocery store. Most mini markets have a small selection of fresh food, but it’s nice to branch out occasionally from roma tomatoes, poblano peppers, cucumbers, and onions.

Top left: Bill at the Marina de Barra de Navidad. Behind him is the hotel/resort.
Top middle: a view of the marina from the hotel. The lobby is six floors up from the marina side of the hotel.
Top right: the town side of Barra. To get from the hotel or the anchorage you have to take a panga, a water taxi. This is the beach near the landing.
Bottom left: an iguana at rest. We’d seen a 3 foot iguana on the dock one morning and as we approached it dove into the water. They’re aquatic! This may or may not be the same one. It was hanging around on this anchor for a couple of days.
Bottom right: if nothing else, daily deliveries to the marina and anchorage by the French Bakery made our stay in Barra fun. He has a selection of pastries, quiche and bread for reasonable prices, delivered to your boat.

Back we went to Tenacatita. Some of the same boats were there, but new boats as well, coming and going from Barra or Zihuatanejo, farther south.

Estuary birds, Tenacatita.
Top, L to R: Little Blue Heron, Snowy Egret, Green Heron
Middle top: juvenile Night Heron practicing yoga, Lesser Yellowleg, Neotropic Cormorant with a Pelican in the background.
Middle bottom, L to R: Brown Pelicans, Tropic Kingbird, Osprey.
Bottom, L to R: Common Black Hawk, Black Vulture, Turkey Vulture.
(Corrections welcome if Nina has fluffed the IDs).

Since there are basically no services near the anchorage, a trip into town is necessary. We walked up to the hotel with Marshall from Tenacity to catch a taxi, about a 45 minute ride. The beach landing at La Manzanilla can be wild so we opted for the calmer, longer road trip version and saw a couple of coatis while heading up the cobble stone road from the hotel. The paved road portion of the trip is under construction. In town, the farmer’s market was on and we recognized many of the same vendors as the market in Barra. Bought a couple of small, colorful tablecloths for the boat, and some groceries.

Bahia Tenacatita from the road to La Manzanilla. A statue on the beach in La Manzanilla.

We all wanted to see the crocodile refuge so off we went.

Left: it was feeding time when we arrived at the refuge. The boardwalk is just feet above the water surface. Crocs have a chomp and gulp technique when they eat that we got to observe closer than was totally comfortable.
Middle: one of the crocs lounging around. The crocs are American crocodiles, so they can’t handle salt water. Thankfully, or they’d be swimming out among the bay’s snorkelers.
Right: the boardwalk leading to an observation tower. The tower had a number of persons limit, which was a good thing, as it was a bit wobbly.

Left: termite mound. This one was about three feet tall, and there were a number of them throughout the refuge.
Middle: an iguana in a tree sunning itself.
Right: Great Egret on an old boardwalk. Birdlife was abundant in the refuge. We saw some ibis, a number of herons, long tailed grackles, and heard many others. The refuge also has an informative museum (all in Spanish) with some impressive skeletons as well as a display of insects and some local history. We ended up spending about an hour and a half at the refuge.

When we were in the refuge, we heard what sounded like a parade. We got out in time to see the last group of riders go by. It was the beginning of the four day rodeo and this caballero pequeño was horsesitting while his grownup went into the store.

Pangas in La Cruz. The tents behind them are part of the Sunday Market.

Birds on the docks and on the breakwater at Marina La Cruz. Heermann’s gulls, snowy egret (?), elegant terns, and bottom row: yellow crowned night herons, adult and juvenile.

La Cruz de Huanacaxtle is a small town at the north end of the Bahía de Banderas, or Banderas Bay. It has a good anchorage and a marina. We dropped anchor on December 18 and rowed in to check out the marina and town. The dinghy dock here is expensive – 80 pesos a day, but on occasion you can tie up without paying if the security guys are otherwise engaged. The town has a very nice fish market, a tortilleria where you can get warm fresh tortillas for 9 pesos per half kilo, and some small grocery stores where you can buy basics. A half kilo of medium large shrimp can be bought at the fish market for 100 pesos (figure about 18 pesos per dollar).

Every Friday night, there are dancing horses in front of the La Cruz Inn.

La Cruz has restaurants, condos to rent, whale watching excursions, an amazing Sunday market, and gringos everywhere. But there is no ATM or bank in La Cruz. For that you have to go to the next town, Bucerias, or into Puerto Vallarta on the south end of the bay. A combi ride to Bucerias is 12 pesos each and takes maybe 20 minutes. For 24 pesos each you can ride the bus into Puerto Vallarta and depending on where you go, that can take 45 minutes to over an hour. We did discover early on that all stops, or paradas, are not equal. You can’t assume that just because you got off at one place that the return stop would be just across the street.

Bill in Marina Puerto Vallarta and to the right the resident croc. The harbor wall rocks were the only barrier between it and us, except for a short length of yellow caution tape. This little fellow was about ten feet long.

One of our early adventures was the afternoon the dinghy decided to escape. It was not tied as securely as it should have been and Bill looked up to see it drifting out the bay. Luckily a panga was going nearby, so Nina frantically waved her arms, discovered she still has a decent taxi whistle and got their attention. Dinghy rescued! Hooray for the panga fishermen!

We have coined the phrase “wild google chase” – just because google says it’s there doesn’t mean it is. So far it’s been true for banks, bookstores, and outboard motor shops and we strongly suspect more. Bill researched the locations of about six places he thought we could look at outboard motors. It was time. We do like to row, but rowing half an hour in the heat to get in to a dock is a very different experience than rowing half an hour in the Pacific Northwest. It was time to track down a 2 horsepower engine, about as much as our dinghy could handle. We’d talked about an electric motor, but they are twice as expensive, they have to be charged, and no one down here sells them. Zaragosa, PV’s version of West Marine had a 3.3 Mercury, but nothing smaller. The Suziki dealer turned out to sell cars and pointed roughly in the direction of where the outboard store was but was not more specific. The marine store by Marina Vallarta sold outboard parts but not motors. We caught another combi and headed over to Las Glorias to the Yamaha dealer. It didn’t look like much – a small storefront filled with boxes of outboard oil, a foot high concrete sill to step over and a small customer window that was closed. It popped open. Enough English was spoken that, yes, they did sell outboards, and yes, they did have a 2 horse in stock, would we like to look at it? Should we buy it? We decided, yes, which turned out to be a good thing. It would take a couple of days for the transaction to clear and they would then deliver the motor to La Cruz. One last stop, Star Marine. No longer there, which was when we coined the phrase wild google chase. We now have an outboard, and we are quite enjoying it.

Top: Bill and the new baby. On the bottom: we wanted to protect the transom of the dinghy where the motor mounts. Plywood, any wood for that matter, is difficult to find in Mexico, so Bill bought and repurposed a bamboo cutting board and added some strapping to hang it in place. The hand hole just fit over the transom bolts.

The transmission fluid dipstick. The cap broke and we needed to find something that would fit the metric threads. If Yanmar did sell a replacement part, we had no way of quickly getting it. From the local cruisers’ net, Bill found some likely sources for bolts in Bucerias. A helpful guy on the bus told him where to get off. At the second tornilleria (screw store) he went to, in Mezcales, the guy behind the counter improvised a solution.

Why La Cruz? There’s always something going on. The marina has a full calendar of activities from yoga to Spanish classes to weekly free movies, to guest speakers, to kids activities and so on. We have been happy to participate. The Christmas Eve potluck was fun and we got to meet some new folks. We’ve done a movie night, heard Jeanne Socrates speak about her circumnavigations twice (she holds the record for a solo, unassisted, non-stop circumavigation and she was 77 when she did it). We got to hear Jamie and Behan Gifford from Totem speak several times. They have spent the last ten years circumnavigating with their three children. As one fellow cruiser said, when you hear them at a boat show, most of the audience is wannabees, here we’ve all actually set off in one way or another. We are also a 30-45 minute bus ride from Puerto Vallarta, so there are lots of options.

Outside of PV is the Jardín Botánico de Vallarta. We were invited to go by Tom and Annie from Tappan Zee, who we had met in La Paz, and we were joined by Marshall from Tenacity. We caught an early bus into PV and had the ride of our lives. Bus drivers are paid by the passenger rather than an hourly rate, so the more runs per day the better. Apparently the driver decided that it was a competitive driving day. He managed to keep it just this side of a bus demolition derby. There were locals with their phones on video recording the very close calls with other buses. We were all grateful to arrive in one piece. Annie was studying her Spanish during the ride and missed most of the drama. It took us two more buses to get to the garden and thankfully both rides were both mellow. The garden – think Buchart Gardens gone tropical with orchids, hummingbirds (at least three kinds), a river to swim in, and all kinds of butterflies everywhere. It’s gorgeous. On the way back, Nina got to check off a travel bucket list item – riding on a chicken bus. The bus from the garden was a nice tour bus, but she kept hearing bird chirps somewhere in the bus. Maybe birds had flown into the bus and were roosting in the luggage rack. Finally, looking across the aisle, a row back she spotted a bag that was moving. It had several chicks in it peeping away. It was a pretty deluxe chicken bus, but a chicken bus nonetheless.

Butterflies, plants and birds at the Jardín Botánico de Vallarta. Middle row birds (L to R) are a San Blas Jay, a West Mexican chachalaca and a yellow-winged cacique. Bottom row is a cacique fiesta. There were so many interesting things to see close up, that we failed to get pictures of the overall garden setting.

Sunday market. French Bakery. Vegan ice cream shop. Whales in the bay. New friends. Meeting friends of friends. And then we were off again. After nearly four weeks in La Cruz, we headed south to Bahía Chamela. We rounded Cabo Corrientes, the point where Mexico starts to swing east, during the night. The wind picked up more than the predicted but other than being rolly, it wasn’t a bad ride.

Chamela is a beautiful bay. We spent a couple of days in the bay just off the town of Pérula and then a couple of days in the islands. Bill got in some snorkeling and saw some colorful fish and sea stars. His other snorkeling was to begin scraping off the barnacles on the bottom of the boat. We’d had the bottom cleaned by a diver while we were in La Cruz but it was starting grow already. And things do grow quickly here. The first night off of Isla Pajarera we were treated to a fantastic lightning show over the mainland mountains that lasted two hours.