Things That Thunk

We think we might previously have spoken about the insidious power of boat-bound slothfulness. Humans are of course ever resourceful in wreaking all manner of destructiveness until suddenly, and without explanation, they get stupidly lazy. Something about sailboat life (well actually it could have something to do with too much sun and beer) can make a crew become lazy-ass do-nothings. So for those few readers of this blog who might have been wondering where the hell we have been all this time, we present as Exhibit “A”, our friend, Mr. Sloth.

Since leaving our adventure in cow country we have traversed about 500 miles of previously covered seas, made a short trip home, and spent way too long in Puerto Vallarta trying to get our engine injector pump serviced.

Beer Drinking Beach Sloth

Happiness is a Fixed Engine Injector Pump - at Paradise Village Marina, PV

Christmas dinner aboard One Fine Day in PV.

Fun day sail with Gord and Sharon and friends.

Carnival parade at Barra de Navidad.

Dinner with our friends Manuel and Emma at Colimilla.

The French Baker visits the boats at Barra de Navidad delivering fresh baked goods.

Friday night raft-up, officiated by "The Mayor", at Tenacitita.

Leaving Mazatlan, we headed overnight towards PV and through the ever-present fishing pangas with their drift nets. Aside from their indiscriminate fish by-catches, drift nets also present annoying hazards to navigation. Pangas deploy their 2-3 mile long floating nets, marked with a black flag on one end and a Javex bottle on the other - no lights. In between the ends of the net are numerous pop bottles that hold the top edge of the net near the surface. Drift nets, bad enough during the day, are random mystery keel catchers at night. But despite their annoying keel grabiness and love of coiling around spinning propellers, drift nets are only the small potatoes of trouble.

On Anduril, a person is always on deck, both day and night. Night watches of course are more of a crap shoot for running into things, but all sailors try very hard to believe that what you can’t see at sea can’t hurt you.

Clunking our boat into a hard object that is connected to the ground is often just a few seconds of inattention away, but we like to think that good boat navigation keeps us safe from that sort of trouble. So if you are wondering what truly scares most sailors, it is whacking into hard and unseen things that are randomly floating at sea.

Lately we have been seeing a huge variety of sea life. Too many dolphins to count have surfed our bow. A couple of days ago while sailing along in clear open water we made a good hard “clunk contact” with something, stopped the boat and turned it around to look and see if we could identity the WTF object, but the sea was empty. Finally we realized it must have been of the hundreds of sea turtles in the area, diving too late on our approach and getting a goodly thunk on the shell as a reward for its own lack of sea-going attentiveness.

Yet it is always whales that inspire the greatest feelings of awe and smallness. This year we have made at least 100 whale sightings, close and far. Banderas Bay at this time of year gets a lot of Humpback Whales. We have always been wary of whale collision, but we believed the risk was only while sailing in choppy waters because a small boat with no engines running could almost soundlessly sneak up on a whale. So when we were leaving PV and straight line motoring past the Marietas Islands in calm seas at 7.5 knots we were hugely surprised and frightened to see a humpback whale and her calf suddenly surface directly ahead, one boat length away, on an imminent and I thought an unavoidable collision course.

Alice luckily was standing right by the helm and seeing the danger a second or two before me, she had already thrown the throttle to neutral. I yelled “full reverse” and Alice promptly went full throttle reverse, which reduced our speed as we lost sight of the whales directly below our bow and waited for a very hard thump.  Had we not slowed so quickly the collision would have been cruel and ugly. As it was, Mom and pup slipped below sight under the bow as we steamed right over top of them. They surfaced with their humpy backs a mere 15-20 feet to port and directly abeam. Mom’s tail was then still under our keel. Whew! How we missed them is hard to believe. Close call. Aside from of course never wanting to accidentally injure a whale, we have read accounts of boat collisions with whale calfs and the boat then getting immediately sunk by the angry parents.

Just after a near collision with a mother humpback and calf.

 Another Crevalle Jack - Unfortunately not the tastiest fish.

Fishboat or maybe I should say Birdboat.

Dolphins swimming the bow is almost a daily wonder.

Heading south from PV the terrain slowly but surely becomes less visited by cruisers. South of Manzanillo the coast becomes a glory for intrepid surfers, which of course means desolation as to protected boat anchorages.  Lately we have been spending some long hot days under passage heading southeast towards Zihuatanejo, where we will take in the Guitar Festival from March 3^rd to 10^th.  

Today we find ourselves in one of the few “sort of safe” anchorages along this stretch, rising and falling with the swell at Caleta de Campos. We have been overrun all yesterday and today with young Mexican boys who have swum out to the boat to visit. Providing them with free use of our kayaks for playing in the surf and also feeding them potato chips with coca cola seems to have made us into rather popular Gringos. They are charming little fellows and are they ever better at fishing than us. In short order they brought out to the boat an ingenious multi-hooked fishing apparatus that promptly yanked up 5 little fishes at once. As evening fell tonight muchos pescara were bagged up for the children’s trip back to their fishing village homes. Las familias de los niños no pasarán hambre esta noche!

The boys at Caleta de Campos.