Chillin' in Chamela
01 March 2015 | Tenacatita
Vandy
We spent four beautiful days in Chamela, anchored in the gap between Isla Pajarera and Isla Novilla, falling back into the rhythms of life afloat that don't necessarily include needing to know the day of the week. We were glad to have thrown out a stern anchor, as the directions of the wind and swells didn't always agree, but with an anchor in front and another behind, SCOOTS' bow stayed pointed mostly into the swells, so we were quite comfortable.
Though of a Vandy-approved temperature, the water in the bay was disappointingly unappealing, being a distinct shade of green, and sporting swathes of dead jellyfish and salps, so we didn't do any swimming or snorkeling. We did take the dinghy for an exploration of some of the nearby islands, though, which finally revealed to us the destination of all the tourist-laden pangas that zoomed close behind our boat many times each day: around the other side of one of the islands was a little beach complete with a shady palapa.
Our curiosity quenched, we dinghied over to a little beach on another side of the island. There were neither tourists nor a palapa here, but the trees that grew just beyond the beach provided plenty of natural shade - just be sure not to linger beneath the pelican nests! Speaking of pelicans, I have now heard a pelican voice for the first time. Think about it...have YOU ever heard a pelican make a sound?
Back aboard SCOOTS, I took advantage of the relative isolation to take a shower on the swim step - keeping a weather eye out for those pesky tourist pangas - lest those tourists get more sightseeing than they had intended. I had just managed to wrap a towel around myself as a panga came zooming around the point. I waved at them as I stood on the deck, using my other hand to hold up the towel. Some aspects of my daily life are more exciting now, than they used to be.
We left Chamela on Sunday, March 1, intending to catch and ride the forecast 7-13 knot NW winds to Bahia Tenacatita, a pretty bay about thirty miles south. It was a beautiful day, but the wind did nothing that it was predicted to do: it was all from the SW and varied from 2-15 knots, meaning that we divided our time between close- reaching and motoring (to get around the points of land).
With all the quiet wind and water, though, we got to see a few sea turtles, and could even hear whales and dolphins breathing, in addition to seeing them. We also had full bars on my phone, so we called our son, Nick, in Alaska, and had a nice chat with him. It was a good day, even though the wind didn't do as it was supposed to.
We pulled into Bahia Tenacatita in the late afternoon and took a cruise around the anchorage, which, though quite large, had a bunch of boats already floating in it (27 by my count). We took a spot at the edge of the group, rather than trying to wedge ourselves into the middle somewhere.
Though we were disappointed that our friends, Robert (the current "Mayor of Tenacatita") and Virginia, of the sailboat Harmony, had already left the bay for points north, we were happy to see that some of our other friends, Pat and Melodie, from Starshine, whom we hadn't seen in a few months, were anchored here. In fact, we had them over to SCOOTS one evening, to catch up on each other's adventures and enjoy some snacks in the cockpit.
There's a quite active cruising community in Tenacatita, in spite of all the comings and goings of the transient boats, with daily games of bocce ball and Mexican Train dominoes on the beach, as well as organized beach walks, swims, and the Friday dinghy raft-up happy hour. On our first day here, we took our dinghy to the beach for a nice, leisurely lunch at the palapa restaurant, then spent the afternoon ashore playing Mexican Train and another game called "Bones" with some of the other cruisers.
The crew of Dodger Too, who'd brought the "Bones" game, told us that it originated in Siberia, when soldiers devised the game using ankle bones from their deceased horses. Nowadays, the "bones" are actually molded plastic replicas of horse ankle bones. I'm glad for that. In case you're not familiar with horse ankle bones, they're knobby things about four inches long, three inches wide, and about an inch thick. They fit well in your hand, which is useful, as you'll see.
"Bones" is sort of like lawn bowling: two lines of bones, each containing about a dozen white bones with a black bone set off a little bit away at each end, are stood up about twenty feet apart. Each of the two teams takes turns lobbing eight red bones at the farther line of white and black bones, attempting to knock them down. BUT, the twist is that you must first knock down the two black bones before you can start on the white ones. It's a fun game, even if the design is a bit morbid.
On our second day here, the swells picked up a bit, making dinghy trips into (and especially out of) the beach a bit dicier than usual. But we wanted to take our dinghy up the little river here, for the "estuary jungle tour" - yes, another jungle tour - so we visited Chris, aboard the boat Legacy, who, we were told, is the ?Mayor Emeritus of Tenacatita.? and got some good advice from him for where to bring our dinghy in through the reef in the current swell conditions.
The trip up the river was really fun. Along the way, the course narrowed down to a 1.5 boat-width tunnel cut through the mangroves. It really felt like being in the jungle! On our expedition, we saw lots of birds, lots of fish, lots of crabs, an iguana, and even a small crocodile.
When we arrived back at the river's mouth, the tide was in the process of going out, the surf had kicked up, and the relatively placid path we had taken through the reef was inaccessible due to low water. So we pulled our dinghy up onto the beach and studied our options for getting back to SCOOTS, who was bobbing pleasantly way out in the anchorage.
We were relieved to see that in between the sets of large, curling breakers were periods of relative calm, during which one could - with proper technique and timing - push a dinghy into the water and get it going quickly enough to be through the surf line before the next big swell came ashore. And so we did. After one exciting ride up the steep front side of an approaching swell, and smashing down on the back side, we zipped our way back across the anchorage, right-side-up and almost dry.
We decided to spend the rest of the day on board relaxing and taking care of boat projects ? foregoing the daily afternoon bocce ball and dominoes on shore ? rather than tempting fate, the breakers, and Neptune's mirth, twice in one day.