Chemela - January 12-17, 2010

After leaving Yelapa late in the day on January 11, 2010, we headed for Chamela.  This meant that we had to do another overnight sail.  This sail was different from the other overnighters in that we were sailing parallel to the coast but.... this part of the coast is pretty uninhabited which means no lights on shore to guide us.  To make matters worse, there were no stars or moon so it was VERRRRRy dark.  I was pretty "creeped out" and I must admit I made one of my big bloopers during my watch.  When I got up at 5 o'clock to take over, (where we are the sun does not come up til 7:15), it was dark and there was wind.  About 45 minutes later the sails started flopping around and I took them in and started the engine.  Unfortunately I neglected to put the boat in gear.  So while the engine was running we weren't going anywhere.  After about twenty minutes I noticed that we were literally going no where.  The chart plotter said we weren't moving and the time to our planned destination had gone blank.  I woke Phil up in a panic thinking I had run over some long lines and tangled the prop.  He opened one eye and asked me if I had put the boat in gear when I had turned on the engine.  Feeling pretty dumb I admitted I hadn't.  He rolled over and went back to sleep.  I went back to my watch feeling pretty foolish and praying that the sun would hurry up and come out.

We arrived in Chemela about 11:30 a.m.  We anchored up in the north west corner of the bay and started setting up to be in this anchorage for a while.  Chemela turned out to be a great stop. We fished.

Phil getting ready to thow back one of the many fish we caught that we could not eat.  This is a puffer.


We snorkeled. We played on the beach and swam every day (yeah, the water is still 80 degrees, so we know the El Norte's are still hatin' us).

 We wandered through town and bought veggies, fruit and tortillas.

This is main street Chemela on Saturday afternoon.  As you can see it is not a very busy place.

We ate in the palapas we found on shore.  The fish is pretty good here.

We talked to ex-pats living in houses right on the beach, or in palapas built to cover their gigante RV's. We had neighbors over for dinner.  No need for cars here.  Claudia and Bill are on a boat named of all things - Sabbatical - same as our name.  It has caused lots of confusion and sometimes fun for us in some of the anchorages.  We have started referring to our boat as Sabbatical - con ninos and they have started calling themselves Sabbatical - Verde (since their boat is green - dubbed such by Sophie on Liberty).    They actually have the right to the name since Bill really is on sabbatical from his teaching duties at UC Irivine.

We even had a brief storm pass over us and leave rainbows behind. It stopped our school lessons one morning - giving us a pleasant diversion from fractions and decimals.  It's somewhat hard to see in these pictures but at 10:00 a.m. the sky was black and the rain was pouring down.  Little did we know that this would be NOTHING compared to what we would see in Barra.

Our friends still up in Puerto Vallarta had a much rougher time: rain, winds, and water spouts. Ugh! That doesn't sound like much fun! It is a lot more fun watching rain from the comfort of the cockpit.

Some of the highlights of time in Chemela were 1) Kelly lost her first molar and the tooth fairy brought her 50 pesos (about 4 bucks); 2) We had these crazy dolphins rub their bodies along our anchor chain half scaring us to death one night that our anchor was dragging: 3) we had a whale pass right by our boat that I would have missed if Bill from Sabbatical - Verde  had not shouted at me to look up (I was cleaning the cockpit at the time); 4) I got dumped out of the dinghy trying to get back to the boat one day - I can laugh about it now but my ego was bruised at the time; and 5) best of all was watching the baby dolphin (it was about two feet long) trying to get over to see our boat while it's mother kept trying to stir it away from our boat and the whole time the small dolphin kept trying to jump over its mom's back to get to our boat where our kids were making a lot of noise.  Goes to show you that kids will be kids no matter what the species.

We spent a sweet 5 days in Chemela.  The rest of this is taken from an e-mail Phil sent out after our stay in Chemela.  He worte "It's more what I hoped Mexico would be like - a beautiful bay and a nice small town with awesome scenery. There are several mountain ranges that ring the bay. Photographers and painters would have a field day capturing the late afternoon light. The only downside has been the swell. We're tucked into the preferred anchorage in the NW corner, but the swell always seems to finds its way in here around Punta Rivas. We're quite a distance from shore, but even the boats closer in are rocking and rolling. With all the rocking, I've heard squeaks and noises I've never heard from the boat before. The swell is not all the large (most of the time), but it's fairly constant. You do get used to it after a while, and it might even help the crew get their sea legs."  It definitely did.  By the time we left Chemela no one was sick any more.  We can now sleep with the boat pitching and rocking any old way.

We left Chemela on Sunday, January 17th, heading for Tenacatita.  During the six hour short hop down the coast we saw over a dozen sea turtles - the full grown kind.  We also saw some of the most brightly painted homes we have ever seen in some of the beach towns that populate this part of the Mexican coast.  One of the homes even had its own golf course.