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.

Cowboys Are Not Always Hot

Cowboy fantasies seem to be universal. Girls, boys, gays, trans, those with unusual pronouns, and Germans (for some weird reason especially people from Germany) and basically everyone, including even robots (ref. Westworld) fantasize themselves as gun-toting, sombrero-wearing, bad-asses-but-with-hearts-in-the-right-place sorts of people.

We too reimagine ourselves as too-hot-to-handle coffee drinking cowboys(girls) that’r into horses and/or boys that’r also into horses ‘n cacti ‘n leather goods.

The moniker “cowboy” however is gendered, so forgive us when we use that word. Realize that what we really mean is Horse People. We all want to be horse people. And for other horse people to think we are the hot sort of horse people that other horse people, you know, want to be horsey with.

But Alice just informed me that that isn’t it at all. What we are both trying to say is we wanted to go on a train. The train is called “El Chepe”, the Copper Canyon Train and on the train and in the canyon there are people who wear sombreros.

We got to our train-ride starting place at a town called “El Fuerte”. This seemed like a really sexy name for the start of a cowboy fantasy. But after a promising start, our protagonist writer cowboy promptly got taken by a strong Mexican mala, under which affliction would he spend most of his stay at the charming hotel Torres in the prone condition known as “no romantico, muy banyos.” Luckily Alice was unaffected and able to escape the sick room and try to catch the eye of all the manly El Fuerte cowboys by taking pictures of them.

Courtyard in the 400 year old Torres del Fuerte Hotel

The Fiji Room and Greg's sick bed

This looks interesting.    Let's go inside.

The bar at the Torres del Fuerte Hotel

Stuff on the wall.

Keeping a close eye on the gringos at the bar

 #cowboylove #sexy #hot #badass

Love in El Fuerte

Baptism Photo 

The Quinceanera Celebration - 15th birthday passage to womanhood.     

Fuck that's young.   She should be out climbing trees.

The Hill of the Mask - Petroglyphs 800 to 2500 years old

Still feeling queasy on the morning of the second day, and giving my sphincter what the British might call “stiff upper lip instructions”, we presented ourselves to the conductor and were allowed on the train.

The Chepe train is an old-school marvel, with uniformed staff and a traditional dining car. El Tren de El Chepe is pleasure to ride on, but really the whole point of the undertaking is to admire the incredible views out of the rail car windows. Tren El Chepe winds through a massive canyon system formed by the Rio Urique. The scale of this natural formation dwarfs that of the better known Grand Canyon of Arizona, and the views are simply spectacular, as are the mind-boggling feats of railroad engineering required to build a line through this rugged terrain. The train tracks cling to the steepest imaginable slopes and the line includes eighty six mountain tunnels of up to 7km length and numerous humongous bridge spans.

What better way to get up close and personal with a cowboy than at a ranch? At Bahuichivo we checked in for some country living at Cabanas San Isidro. A nice wood burning stove in our room kept us warm in the tolerably chilly nights. We adventured down 1,800m to the valley floor and the namesake town of Urique, not on a horse, but on a roof with seats. Wee!

At rancho San Isidro we met a lovely Mexican family from Tepic and toured another little town with them called Cerrocahui. Being from a hot part of Mexico, they had to dress up in puffy clothes, and we as Canadians responded, “Cold? This ain’t cold!”

Cabanas San Isidro

Cabanas San Isidro - campfires at night

Riding on top

Heading 1800 meters down to Urique

Wazoo!!!    Hang on tight.   Seatbelts broken.

Urique

See Greg Run

Overheating on the climb up

Cerocahui tour - Canadian in T-shirt & Mexican in the puffy jacket.

Cerocahui Catholic Boarding School for the local Tarahumara girls

The train stop at Posada Barrancas is famous for its crazy precipitous views, the Hotel Mirador and for its adventure park. Being too cheap to spring $300/night for the Mirador, we stayed in the nights in modest rooms at Cabanos Diaz. In the afternoons we mooched off the Mirador’s luxurious accommodations and enjoyed the viewing deck with a bottle of their wine.

The skyrider zip line at Barrancas is the longest in the world and takes you flying in your little canvass seat at over 120km/h across the canyon. The near freezing rain drops felt a lot like bullets on our cheeks! It felt a lot like a skydive, actually, though maybe a slight bit tamer. At night in our Diaz cabin we were thankful for a great big fireplace and a large supply of firewood. Hmmm, it does seem to be getting cold in cowboy country...

Hotel Mirador view

Zip Lines

El Chepe at Posada Barrancas station

Which way to the Cabanas Diaz?

Cabanas Diaz

Staying warm at night

Met us at the station and brought us to the Cabanas

#happycowgirl

Our horse handlers

Next stop was Creel, and the recent snowfall convinced us that it was time to stop pretending that it was in any way warm outside. A shopping excursion provided us with some touques and gloves. We needed those for a mountain bike excursion through Tarahumara country, where interesting rock formations included some very tall rocks known as “Bisabirachi”, translating as “Valley of the Erect Penises”. Cowfolk are straight talking people, doncha know?

After getting slightly lost on the bikes and forced to route-find our way home on paths that wound through Tarahumara homesteads, it was time to head out again on the train. Last stop, Chihuahua.

Tarahumara selling baskets at the train stop

Biking in Creel

Bisabirachi - Valley of the Erect Penises

More beautiful countryside was viewed from the dining car window frames, with our window rubbernecking finally terminated by darkness. Getting off the train at nearly 10pm and with our sombrero fantasies abating, we checked in to a lovely room at Hotel San Felipe El Real.

Chihuahua looks like a town worth further exploration, but sadly we had time only for a late dinner overlooking the lights of the church square. The morning would take us on a flight back to Mazatlan and a return to everyday boat life. Adios, all you sexy, leather clad, hat-wearing hombres and chicas. Until next time!

Last stop - Hotel San Felipe El Real in Chihuahua