The Voyage of Padma

We’re still in Barra de Navidad, anchored in a well-protected lagoon. We absolutely love it here. Any place where we don’t have to do a beach landing is pretty great for us. The friendly owners of the Sands hotel allow us cruisers to tie up our dinghies to their pier. They also provide a free (the cost of a beer) Internet connection, and a swimming pool. Plus the hotel is gorgeous in that moldering sixties style resort kind of way that I absolutely love.

I haven’t been blogging as of late as we’ve had loads of visitors. I hadn’t realized how much time had gone by since we’ve been with people from back home. I have to admit it was a bit of shock for us at first. We had just completed our 1500-mile sail from Nicaragua, and the next day, full on socializing for the next couple of weeks. It was really awesome that friends flew down to visit us. I especially enjoyed the kid on board. What a treat seeing the little person get so excited over dolphins! It reminds me to never take a visit from a pod of dolphins for granted.

In addition to friends, we are also visiting my aunt and uncle, who spend their winters in Mexico. My cousins and their significant others also flew down at the same time. Really great to see my cousin, I just wished I wasn’t so ‘boat-lagged’ when she was here.

I do find that those long passages tend to take quite a bit of out of me. Double-handing up the coast is quite exhausting where you actually have to keep a pretty careful watch. I found our passage from Jamaica to Panama less taxing than sailing along this coast. In the middle of the Caribbean your chances of running over an unlit panga are pretty much nil. It’s the big freighters you have to watch for there, but they all have proper navigation lights and so are easy to avoid. The opposite was true here where you have to dodge fishermen in open pangas dragging nets, sometimes holding up a cell phone for a navigation light or more frequently a dim L.E.D. You also see, our favourite, the ‘shrimpers’, who are well lit, but tend to go around in circles or other odd incomprehensible trajectories. One saving grace of those ‘shrimpers’ is that they are slow, which gives you plenty of time to assess whether they’re going to run you over or not!

We’ve been here for over a month now, but all of this activity makes it seem as though we just arrived. The weather north in the Sea of Cortez is quite brisk, i.e. cold, at the moment, so there is no need for us rush off. Por memento, Chris y yo esperamos para major clima!

Off of Zihuatanejo, Piedras Blancas in background.