We’ve finally made it to Barra de Navidad, and you can’t believe how relieved we feel.  From here up to the Sea of Cortez, it will be day sailing almost the entire way, where we can point hop from bay to bay. After 1500 nautical miles all the way from San Juan del Sur, we’re ready for a little relaxation.

The weather is beautiful in Barra: hot during the day and cool, about 15 degrees at night. After 48 hours at sea, we both slept like babies last night.

The journey here from Zihuatanejo was not without incident. The first night out, as we were rounding Lazardo Cardenia we had a little visit from a Mexican Navy gunboat.  Night had just fallen, and there was no moon. Basically, it was like I had a sleeping bag over my head, until I was flashed by a high-powered spot light. I’m generally used to those, as many of the fishermen use them when they want to indicate to you where they and to please not run over them. This one, however, was different. We were sailing along at about six knots when the spot come from the bow into the cockpit. ‘Gosh, that’s close’ I said, as I immediately turned the boat to port about 90 degrees.  The next thing I knew, the gun boat was right up beside us, as they flashed the entire side of the boat to see what we were.

We weren’t boarded, thankfully, but that pretty much scared the bejeezus out of us.  Imagine a fast armored patrol boat with some sort automatic weapon on the top of it coming at you at about 30 knots in the dark of the night. Yeah, I didn’t really like that. There is a drug war going, though, and I suppose they were just checking and doing their job.  These guys did not show up on radar. Scary.

The next night, we met the California Current at about 2 knots and a head wind.  It was pretty ugly as we bashed through some steep, close together waves.  The wind shifted around off the land though later that night, and the waves laid down, so everything was fine once again. We expected some head wind and current, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised at how little of that we’ve encountered on our trip up north. Actually, looking at the chart, we should have been further off shore. We see now that we were sailing along a shelf, while rounding a cape and perhaps this could have been prevented by going further out in the deeper water.  Still learning, never stops, really.

Anyway Feliz Navidad to everyone following our blog, and thanks for reading!