Tsunami Survival

March 14, 2011

For all of you that are wondering, yes, we did survive the tsunami but not without some drama of our own. To bring you up to speed, we left Barra de Navidad after many almond croissants, baguettes and key lime pies from the French baker, but no surf. The ocean was flat and our tummies were not, so it was time to head north again.

We sailed up to Tenacatita which is a beautiful bay just a day sail north and we dropped the anchor. We decided to stay for a day and take our dinghy up a narrow estuary through the mangroves. It was very cool, kind of like the jungle cruise at Disneyland, without the hippo. We did see lots of birds, red crabs and tons of small fish. It took a couple of hours before we reached a small lagoon and access to a beautiful white sand beach. This beach used to have many restaurants, a few hotels and many gringo residences until a developer with government connections decided that he wanted the land for a mega resort. On a sunny day last August the Mexican military police showed up with over one hundred militia and threw everyone off of their land. The next day bulldozers showed up and mowed down restaurants, palapas and houses. Some of the gringos had owned their homes for over twenty years. Now the beach is patrolled by armed guards and there are no restaurants and only a few homes left, most of which were set on fire. There is of course litigation that is ongoing, but it sure makes you think twice about owning property in a foreign country.

The next day we decided to go straight up to Banderas Bay to La Cruz which should take us about 24 hours. Everything started out really well with a rare wind from the south pushing us up the coast. After five or six hours the wind died and we had to fire up the not so reliable engine. It ran just fine for a few hours and then just stopped as if it were out of fuel. We of course checked a multitude of things that I won’t bore you with but decided that we were out of fuel, even though we calculated that we should have over thirty gallons in the tank. No worries at this point as we are on a sailboat, we decided to sail. Of course at this time the wind picked up but of course it was right on the nose, so we started tacking back and forth and really going nowhere rather slowly.

As the afternoon went turned to evening we knew it was going to be a long night but we did manage to get a little closer to La Cruz. The next morning we started hearing about the earthquake and the tsunami that was following. There wasn’t too much panic in Banderas Bay until the reports started coming in from Santa Cruz and other places in California. At this point the wind has died completely and we tried calling some friends on the radio who were in La Cruz and low and behold, they heard us and said that they were going to come out and meet us with some fuel. They had been asked to leave the Marina as a precaution by the harbormaster and headed our direction.

If I keep going with this story, I will be typing until Christmas and you all will be asleep, so let’s say that it took over 24 more hours before we saw our friends and they had to tow us to a slip in Puerto Vallarta.

The tsunami did hit PV and brought six foot surges into all of the marinas with the only damage happening in the La Cruz marina which broke off two of their brand new docks. I guess we were lucky that we were out floating around as we felt nothing at all.

Anyway we are safe and sound in Marina Vallarta, have fixed our plugged fuel tank and are catching up on our sleep.