One small step

Huatulco, Mexico

Last Thursday, a weather window appeared for transiting the Gulfo de Tehuantepec, a couple of days earlier than we expected.  Wednesday morning I informed the marina at Chiapas that we wanted to be off around 9 AM the next day, to which they replied that is not enough notice to arrange for our marina bill and obtain a “national” Zarpe from the port captain’s office.  After some back and forth, we settled for a noon departure time instead.  We managed to pay our bill by the end of the day so all we had to do on Thursday morning was to take some paperwork to the port captain’s office.  Not surprisingly this took an extraordinary amount of time - by the time we got back to the marina and had our departure inspection by the port captain, the navy and the drug-sniffing dog, we actually left the dock around 12:45.

The two day crossing started off with a 6 hour close-reach sail, followed by 42 hours of motoring.  At times the sea was like glass and we had some spectacular phosphorescence on the first moonless night.  For the last half of the passage, almost 100 miles, we fought a 1 to 2 knot current against us, making us wonder if we would ever get across the gulf.  We burned a lot of diesel to try and maintain a minimum 4 knot speed.

We saw a lot of turtles and birds on this passage, as well as a couple of huge pods of small dolphins.

At some point on the second day, while I was shaking the shrouds in an effort to scare off some boobies that were trying to roost on our spreaders, I noticed that our furling headsail had become detached from the swivel on the halyard, making it impossible to use that sail any more.  We actually did have some reasonable winds in the late afternoon and throughout the second night but it probably would not have been enough for us to maintain our speed against the current, even if we could have used the Genoa.

We arrived at Marina Chahue just after noon on Saturday.  Today, Sunday, we started tackling the headsail issue.  We took the sail down and Susanne tried to stitch up the piece of torn fabric that caused the failure.  I had to make another trip up the mast to retrieve the halyard, as it no longer comes down with the sail since it is no longer attached to same.

Hopefully tomorrow we can successfully hoist and furl the sail.  It appears we have a reasonable pause in the strong westerly winds, starting on Tuesday morning.  For our next leg, we will have to face a strong counter-current for the first 50 miles regardless and really don’t need to be heading straight into the wind as well.

Meanwhile we have been enjoying Huatulco, rather more than we did 5 years ago.  We have wondered around the town of La Crucecita and have had some very nice meals, both in town and at the selection of restaurants here at the marina.  Maybe this place is not so bad after all.

{GMST}15|45.832|N|96|07.318|W|Huatulco, Mexico|Huatulco, Mexico{GEND}