A foot in Mexico

Marina Chiapas, Chiapas, Mexico

My apologies for not posting sooner - the Internet here has been lousy or nonexistent.

To summarize...

We left the estuary in El Salvador on an 8AM high tide, last Wednesday morning, along with 4 other sailboats.  Everyone else turned south/east towards Nicaragua while we headed north/west towards Guatemala and Mexico beyond.

The 50 hour passage was basically uneventful, except for the discovery that our favourite instrument, the wind instrument, would only work from about an hour after sunrise to an hour before sundown.  Apparently the rechargeable battery in the wireless sensor on the top of the mast is no longer taking a charge.  The tiny solar panel on the sensor could power it during the day, but there was no power during the night.  We have become so used to having this wind speed and direction information constantly displayed in the cockpit, that we can no longer figure out how to sail without it.  Actually it was not that much of a problem as there was virtually no wind at night - not much during the day for that matter.  In spite of the lack of wind, the seas were quite lumpy - a bit of a beam-on swell.

We saw the usual assortment of shrimping boats, pangas and unexplained lights on the sea at night.  We managed not to hit anything.

Since we did not want to arrive in Mexico at night, and we had a small favorable current most of the time, we were happy to go slow, sailing in the light winds whenever they would move us at more than 2 or 3 knots.  In total we only managed to cover about 40 miles of the 250 mile passage under sail, arriving at Marina Chiapas around 10AM on Friday.  As usual for us, after a 2-day passage we were thoroughly exhausted.

Most of the rest of Friday was spent on the incredibly complicated process of checking into the country.  We were visited on the boat by a contingent of Navy personnel, complete with AK47 guns and a drug-sniffing dog (who fortunately showed little interest in our boat), followed by a customs inspection agent and a representative from the port captain’s office, with lots of paperwork to be filled in by each of them.  Meanwhile, the manager of the marina took copies of just about every conceivable piece of documentation we have, preparing for phase 2 of the checkin process.

Once everyone was happy, and off the boat, the manager took us, and the crews of 3 other boats that were checking in or out, by car to the various offices.

First was customs, to complete some more paperwork and sign some document or other and get our official piece of paper.

Second was a visit to a lonely little trailer in the navy yard, where we paid a 200 peso port fee and collected our receipt for same.

Third was Immigration, where we filled in the same forms that we would have if we were arriving via air, paid our 533 pesos each, had our passports stamped and received our 180-day tourist visas.

Last, but certainly not least, was a trip to the port captain’s office in the nearby town of Puerto Madero, where we stood around for hours while some extraordinary complex calculations and reams of documents were produced to determine that our fee (for the use of the port?), based on the weight of the boat, was 200 pesos, which cannot be paid for with cash - must be a credit or debit card only.  Of course, none of our cards would work.  After much trial and error, and lengthy telephone calls to somewhere, it was determined that their system cannot accept a Canadian card.  One of the other cruisers kindly offered to pay the fee with their credit card and we gave them the cash.

We are officially in Mexico!

Back at the marina in the late afternoon, we had a wonderful lunch at the marina restaurant, and went to bed early!  We slept for about 12 hours straight.

Nothing much has been going on over the weekend.  Now that it is Monday, the marina workers are back on the job and it is time to start thinking about scheduling our haul out and such.  There is to be a potluck tonight with all of the cruisers that are currently here.  BTW It is brutally hot here!

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