CABO TO ??

La Playa de Mantanchen Bay, San Blas

Four thirty in the morning came and went! The alarm went off at 4:30a.m. We sluggishly got out of bed, got dressed and had the boat all ready to take off. It was still dark out and we were so tired that we decided to go back to sleep.  We later woke up at 10:00 a.m. We checked the weather to see when a good time would be to leave. It looked like 4pm was going to be the best time to get to Mazatlan by daylight within the next couple of days.

Rijnard and Lisa’s boat was now gone so we figured they were on their way to Mazatlan. Hopefully we would be meeting up again with them again there.

The rest of the day we decided to just relax on the beach, swim and have one last meal at The Office on the Beach. 

Around 3pm we headed back to the boat and got prepared to leave by 4pm.

We picked up our anchor and headed out. The winds were very light so we had to motor for a while. In the meantime, we got a call from Rijnard and Lisa on the VHF radio. They were 60 miles ahead of us. They told us they had horrible winds all day along, around 30 knots with messy big seas. Once I heard that I panicked inside. I was anticipating a hellish sail and felt like turning the boat around back to Cabo.  Well about an hour after leaving, sure enough we were in horrible seas and high winds…20-25 knots on our beam along with steep confused waves (boarding waves at times) on our beam. It was awful and it lasted for one night and two days. The winds never died down. While we were enduring these waves, Rick wanted to make the boat more comfortable so he had to change our heading a bit. In changing the heading a bit it was going to send us off our original course so we had to make a decision. Do we fight our way through and go to Mazatlan or do we add an extra day to our trip, make the ride more comfortable and head towards Puerto Vallarta or somewhere thereabouts at dark. We chose to change our course, add a day, make the ride more comfortable (which wasn’t really that more comfortable) and go to San Blas at dark. I definitely didn’t want to miss San Blas.

Finally on our last night the winds died down and the seas calmed down a bit.

Piedra Blanca de Tierra
 (this is a rock that is not on the charts and if it had not been light out we were on a collision course with this rock and would have sailed right into it!)

On the last few hours of our trip our navigational charts on our iPad stopped working so we had to break out the paper charts. But still this wasn’t going to help us much entering Mantanchen Bay (San Blas) at night! We really try to avoid entering any anchorage at night. 

We arrived in San Blas around 8:30p.m. by the light of the moon, anchored and went right to sleep.

Anchored in San Blas, Nayarit

The next morning we woke up to paradise! The views of the bay, the mountains and the lush green foliage were something I’ve only seen in a movie.  We couldn’t wait to get the dinghy off of the boat and into the water to go exploring. And…Harley really wanted to get off the boat. She’d been holding a few days worth of poops in.

So we put on our suits, got our backpacks ready for a day of fun and launched the dinghy. As we headed to shore and the nearby palapa food stands we saw a man standing in the water just beyond the breakers waving us over towards him and his establishment. So we headed that way. He ended up helping us get the dinghy to shore and then allowed Harley to do her business on the beach right by his restaurant. Harley went about 6 different times. I don’t know how she held it for 3 days…poor thing. The man was laughing and saying, “oh it’s fine it’s fine.” I was chasing after her with little doggie bags. It was kind of comical.

Our Amigo, Barro

We were then led over to a very cute little open-air restaurant called Playa Hermosa. It had a dirt floor, and a thatch roof with brightly colored Mexican woven tablecloths on all the tables. The kitchen was partly enclosed with clay bricks and tile. The man introduced himself as Barro and the owner and cook as Alicia. Barro was so kind and spoke a little English, which was quite helpful. Barro offered to keep an eye on our dinghy while we went for a walk, swimming or whatever for the day.

As Rick and I sat down we both looked at each other and said, “This is it”! This is what we had been looking for when we first set out on our trip….a remote little far away place that wasn’t overrun with tourists, and wasn’t Americanized. We wanted the real deal….a place where you could still see and feel it’s history.

There wasn’t much on the menu they had on hand so we ate the only thing available, deep fried cheese quesadillas. So we had an order of those and two Limonada’s.  After our delicious meal, Rick, Harley and I walked down the road a bit and ended up on a beautiful secluded beach!  We walked a bit further and found another beach that had some good waves for body surfing. We put our things down on the beach and ran into the water, diving through the first set of waves. Harley was right with us. She was even catching waves with us. It was pretty cool. She was having as much fun as we were if not more. There were a few other locals on the beach. It appeared to be a family of six. There was a man, wife and four young boys all swimming in the water. The boys were so curious about Harley. They came over to us and asked me all about Harley. I could not understand much of what they were saying and just said, “Si” a lot. They loved Harley!

We swam for quite a while having so much fun. Rick lost his shorts one time and I lost my top every time I caught a wave…real pro’s! The waves eventually started to get bigger and Harley ended up getting tumbled pretty good in one. After that she was a little cautious. She stayed on shore and would make attempts to get back out to us, but she wasn’t getting the timing right and kept getting pushed back by the breaking waves. Finally I’d had too much myself trying to rearrange my bathing suit top constantly and got out with her.

Harley found a friend!

After we all were out of the water, we grabbed our backpacks and we continued on a path along the back of the beach. It was lined thick with trees and bushes with lots of stickers. I was kind of nervous to know what might be inside all of that.  Harley wasn’t nervous and romped around without a care in the world. When she came out of the bushes, she was covered in sharp little clusters of burr like stickers. They were so sharp Rick and I could not pull them out. They needed to be cut out with scissors. Poor Harley…she isn’t looking so great these days. Her hair is so matted in places and over grown and dirty that she almost looks like one of the local dogs.

We made our way back to the Palapa, Playa Hermosa, where we first started. It was turning to dusk and the little no-see-ums (biting bugs you can barely see) were out in full force! Rick and I were slapping ourselves in places where we were being bit. They are supper annoying! Barro had a bucket of burning coconut husks that he put on the ground near our table. The smoke of the husks is supposed to keep the bugs away.

Harley staring at us through our netting we have up to keep the little bugs out

By this time of the day, Alicia had scored some fish from a local fisherman and prepared it for us for dinner. Muy delicioso!

A new couple, Al and Lindy, we met earlier out at anchor came up on the beach on their SUP boards and joined us for dinner. They are originally from Bellingham Washington. They bought their sailboat four years ago in Point Richmond at Brickyard Cove Marina (our old Marina). Small world!

After dinner and getting back to the boat, Rick performed a little de-burring surgery on Harley with a pair of scissors. He did a great job! But the next morning, I decided to get my hands on a pair of scissors to fine tune what Rick had done and I butchered her cute little face.  I need to find her a groomer as soon as possible! And I’m pretty sure they don’t have any down here.

One thing I’ve noticed here that’s different than Baja is the air is humid instead of dry and the water is not that gorgeous blue anymore. It is sort of a greenish color…the same way it looks in SF Bay.  I like the humidity in a way because it makes my hair curly and I don’t have to do a thing to it. 

Tomorrow we plan to go on a Lagoon Jungle Trip up the San Christoval Creek. Supposedly you can see all sorts of birds, crocodiles, jaguars, coati, wild boar etc. We leave here at 7 a.m.