South to Chamela
05 January 2010 | San Blas
Mike & Julie
Well we finally made it around the corner to Chamela. After a couple of false starts due to weather issues, we then tried to leave on the 1st of Jan only to have the auto pilot croak!! To hand steer for 90 miles (at 5-6knots an hour that's about 16hrs) and half of it in the pitch dark and around the major point of Cabo Corrientes; we turned around and headed back to La Cruz to see if it was repairable. Thanks to Mikes endless eBay shopping (not at work I swear) we were able to replace the bad part with a good one and rewire it. Of course that means everything comes out of every locker and Julie and Mike climb in to run the wires from one end of the boat to the other. It's amazing we can pack so much crap into a 37 foot boat, but I will never say "do we really need that spare part?" We made the very lumpy trip South on the 4th at 11:00 pm and arrived on the 5th at around 3:30 pm. We did have a banner whale watching trip. The humpbacks were all around us. We had one very curious whale who after swimming in front of the bow he dove under and rolled over to watch us pass almost over him. We saw the white of his fins and head as he looked right at us from about 20 feet below. It was awesome and kind of scary!! We will spend a while here enjoying the beach and the water. I will post pictures when we get to a place with wifi (of course we got no good whale pics they are amazingly camera shy).