After a week of being annoyed by the daily frigatebird terror tactics (chronicled in a previous blog entry), we decided that it was time to move on to our next destination: Matanchen Bay, about 42 miles from Isla Isabel, and just south of the city of San Blas on the Mexican Pacific coast. We pulled up SCOOTS' anchor just after sunrise and spent the next eight hours having a beautiful sail.

Along the way, we saw some humpback whales and dolphins. We also had a school of about a half dozen, three-foot-long tunas follow us for awhile. I shot a video of it, as I couldn't believe it. They were very beautiful. And very tempting, as they were, well, TUNAS.


Some of our tuna buddies

A short sidebar here: like many people, I'm an omnivore. I like to eat fish and other meat, as well as veggies. But I also have an extreme aversion to hurting animals, even if I'm going to eat them. And so, for most of my life, I've allowed other people to do my "dirty work" as far as killing the animals that I eat. I acknowledge that it's more than a little hypocritical.

When Eric and I first began talking about the cruising life, we often talked about how nutritious - and accessible - a diet of fresh fish would be. As a result, I've been working for quite awhile to find a way to justify/rationalize/normalize the way I think about fishing, so that I could eventually take fish from the ocean and eat them. When we moved aboard SCOOTS, she already boasted a complete arsenal of fishing gear, which Sean used during the Baja Haha to bring in some tunas and a marlin.

So by the time these TUNAS were trailing our boat, I had rationalized that it's really a violent, fish-eat-fish world out there in the ocean; no fish dies of old age. We might as well put a lure in, and if a tuna took the lure, we would at least be able to kill it more humanely than, for instance, a shark would.

So we put in a lure.

And two minutes later, a tuna bit it.

Eric pulled in the tuna - which was between two and three feet long - onto SCOOTS' swim step, and we sprayed its gills with rum to put it to sleep. Permanently.

In the late afternoon, we arrived in Matachen Bay, a beautiful palm-fringed, palapa-lined beach just south of the town of San Blas. Impulsive was already anchored, having arrived the previous day, and we invited her crew, Morris and Debbie, over to share fresh sashimi in our cockpit, as the sun sank spectacularly behind the palms.



The next day, Morris and Debbie picked us up in their dinghy and we went ashore to explore San Blas. Also, Morris wanted to catch the Seahawks' playoff game at the San Blas Social Club. We had lunch at a little restaurant on the plaza, where the awards ceremony for a local bike race was held, including an appearance and speech by a distinguished-looking, mustachioed gentleman, wearing a white cowboy hat and a blue-and-white checked shirt (apparently his trademark outfit), whom we suspected - and later confirmed - was the mayor of San Blas.

The next day, Eric and I provided the dinghy ride to the beach. After locking our dinghy to one of the palapas, we walked to the La Tovara Jungle Cruise, piled into a panga, and headed off into the mangroves. It was a fun trip, a little touristy, a la the Disneyland Jungle Cruise, though still authentic: all the animals were real, not animatronics.

On this trip, we saw many birds...


Anhingas!


Neotropical cormorants!


A Northern Potoo!


Green kingfishers!


Chachalacas!


Tiger herons!


Snail kites!

Tropical kingbirds! Great blue herons! Little blue herons! Snowy egrets!,


Turtles!


Iguanas,!

and yes,


COCODRILOS (crocodiles).

Before this trip, I thought that only alligators lived in the Americas; not crocodiles. But I was wrong...these were American crocodiles, and they were certainly eating well and living well in San Blas. I wondered what the larger ones were finding to eat and hoped that it wasn't tourists.

On this trip, we visited a small cocodrilario (crocodile refuge) and zoo, housing some of the local fauna. I was particularly charmed by the yellow-headed Amazon parrots, who came over to see us, saying, "Hola! Hola!",


"Hola!"

and the tiny baby crocodiles (cocodrilitos?), who were spending the first few years of their life in the safety of the cocodrilario's enclosures.


Baby crocodiles

We had lunch at a shady restaurant overlooking the La Tovara Spring, whose clear waters were surprisingly warm. We dipped our toes but didn't swim. In case you were wondering, the swimming area was fenced off, to prevent the cocodrilos from lunching on the turistas.

Back aboard SCOOTS, we spent time doing some of the requisite "fixing things in exotic places," by tightening the v-belt on the generator and replacing the generator raw water hose, which had chafed.

In addition to being known for its Jungle Cruise, San Blas also has a reputation for having an abundance of tiny biting insects, whose more polite names are "no see ums," "flying teeth," or, in Spanish, "jejenes" (pronounced hay-hay-nays). In fact, these little bloodsuckers have been blamed for keeping San Blas from becoming a more popular tourist destination. We found this reputation to be quite well-deserved - perhaps even understated - as Eric contributed a bunch of his blood and some of his sanity to these critters while we were in the area, in spite of using liberal amounts of bug spray. For some reason, they bothered me less, for which I was grateful. (The invisible stinging things in the water at Isla Isabel preferred me over Eric, so life is, in fact, fair.)